By the Book : A Literary History of Queensland 9780702240447, 9780702234682

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Edited by Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay

By tHe

BooK

A LiterAry History of QueensLAnd

By the

BOOK Patrick Buckridge is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Griffith University, where he teaches literature. He is the regular co-editor, with Belinda McKay, of the Queensland Review, and is the author of a prize-winning biography, The Scandalous Penton (1994). Belinda McKay is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts at Griffith University. She has co-edited the Queensland Review since its inception in 1994, and is the editor of Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation (1999).

By the

BOOK

A LiterAry histOry Of QueensLAnd

Edited by Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay

First published 2007 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia www.uqp.uq.edu.au © 2007 Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay (compilation and introduction) Essays © individual authors This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset in 11.25/14pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group Cover painting, Interior IV (1970), by Margaret Olley, courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery. Cataloguing-in-Publication Data National Library of Australia By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland. Includes index. ISBN 9 78070223 4682 (pbk.) ISBN 9 78070224 0447 (ebook.) 1. Australian literature - Queensland - History and criticism. I. Buckridge, Patrick. II. McKay, Belinda. III. Title.

A820.99943

Contents Map List of Contributors Introduction Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay

vii ix 1

PART 1 South-East Queensland Roles for Writers: Brisbane and Literature, 1859–1975 Patrick Buckridge

11

13

An Unlikely City: The Making of Literary Brisbane, 1975–2001 Todd Barr and Rodney Sullivan

73

Natural Imaginings: The Literature of the Hinterland Belinda McKay

92

‘From Progress into Stand-still Days’: Literature, History and the Darling Downs Christopher Lee

111

PART 2 Central Queensland (Re)Writing Traditions: The Bush Ethos in Central Queensland Writing Denis Cryle

141

PART 3 Western Queensland ‘Where the Pelican Builds’: Writing in the West Robin Trotter and Belinda McKay

183

143

185

PART 4 North Queensland Warm Words: North Queensland Writing Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins

211

PART 5 Statewide themes ‘Bitin’ Back’: Indigenous Writing in Queensland Maggie Nolan

257

213

259

Locating Queensland Children’s Literature: Reef, Bush and City Philip Neilsen

278

The Holiday-Maker’s Happy Hunting Ground: Travel Writing in Queensland Simon Ryan and Patrick Buckridge

301

Endnotes Index

323 367

Map of Queensland divided into regional sections

Cape York

North Queensland

Cairns

Townsville Mount Isa Mackay

Western Queensland

Longreach

Central Queensland

Birdsville

Brisbane and surrounds South-East Queensland

300km

Tropic of Capricorn

Sunshine Coast

Cunnamulla

0

Rockhampton

Gold Coast

List of contributors Todd Barr is the co-author, with Rod Sullivan, of Words to Walk By: Exploring Literary Brisbane (2005). He currently works as a Strategic Policy Officer with the Townsville City Council. Pat Buckridge is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Griffith University, where he teaches literature. He is the regular co-editor, with Belinda McKay, of the Queensland Review, and is the author of a prizewinning biography,The Scandalous Penton (1994). Denis Cryle is a Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Central Queensland University. He has published widely on Queensland culture and on media history. Chris Lee teaches literature and cultural studies at the University of Southern Queensland. His research interests have centred on Australian writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Belinda McKay is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts at Griffith University. In 1994 she co-founded Queensland Review, which she currently co-edits with Pat Buckridge. Her research interests include Queensland cultural history and modernist writing. Philip Neilsen is Head of Creative Writing and Cultural Studies at the Queensland University of Technology. He has published several fiction books for children and young adults, and five collections of poetry. Maggie Nolan is a lecturer in Australian Studies at Australian Catholic University (ACU). Her research interests relate to questions of race and identity in Australian cultural production, with a specific focus on hoaxes and imposture. Elizabeth Perkins, O.A.M., was an Associate Professor in the Department of English at James Cook University. She retired in 1996, and passed away in 2004. Elizabeth published many articles and chapters on

Australian literature, and in 1970 she co-founded LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland). Simon Ryan is an Associate Professor in Literature at the Brisbane Campus of the Australian Catholic University. Rod Sullivan is retired from his position as Associate Professor in History & Politics at James Cook University. He has since co-authored A Walker’s Guide to the Gold Coast (2002) and Words to Walk By: Exploring Literary Brisbane (2005). Cheryl Taylor is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Education and Social Sciences at James Cook University in Townsville. She publishes on Middle English and Medieval Latin contemplative writing, and on northern Australian literature. For many years she co-edited LiNQ with Elizabeth Perkins. Robin Trotter is a researcher in cultural history and policy in the School of Arts at Griffith University. She has a particular interest in Australian regional cultures.

Introduction Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay . . . Queensland is fluid in shape and size, it ebbs and flows and refuses to be anchored in space, it billows out like a net that can settle without warning over its most wayward children and pull them home. There is no escaping it. It is always larger than would appear on the map. Janette Turner Hospital1 In 1859 the self-governing colony of Queensland was created from the former convict settlement of Moreton Bay (established in 1824) and the recently occupied pastoral districts to the north and west.2 In its final form – achieved only after several decades of pastoral and mining expansion north and west from Brisbane – the colony extended from the Tweed River in the south to Cape York some 2,000 kilometres to the north, and west to a line bisecting the Gulf of Carpentaria and extending south almost to Lake Eyre in the centre of the continent. It is the second largest in area of the six Australian states, after Western Australia, and the third most populous, after New South Wales and Victoria. The inland boundaries of Queensland might well have been drawn differently, and for a time they were. Even the name might have been different: ‘Cooksland’, for example, passionately advocated by John Dunmore Lang, was a serious contender. But even artificial cartographic entities, if they continue to exist for some time – and especially if they

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Introduction

prosper – may generate their own sense of a natural and authentic cultural identity, and perhaps even a conviction of essential difference from other comparable entities, such as the other Australian states. Queenslanders have certainly developed, or been encouraged to develop, such a conviction at various times in the state’s history. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, the heyday of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s ascendancy as premier, the notion of a ‘Queensland difference’ suited people on both sides of politics, and both sides of the border. It provided for the government a simultaneous rationale for autocratic and authoritarian government, a malapportioned electorate and an inferior education system, and for its critics and opponents an explanation for their inability to check these and other abuses. A vigorous academic debate was waged in these years between those who saw the ‘Queensland difference’ as a reality and those who regarded it as an invention of conservative politicians and a compliant media, designed to conceal Queensland’s essential continuity with the rest of Australia: its beginnings, for example as a convict settlement, something it shared with every other state except South Australia. Since the defeat of the National Party government in 1989, however, much of the heat has gone out of the debate. Affirmations of difference, except on the sports field, no longer look either interesting or disinterested, and they are invoked more rarely than they used to be. Even the ‘Smart State’ campaign of recent years seems largely an exercise in differential branding rather than an expression of serious exceptionalism (though the resurgence of reactionary populism around the figure of Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s may lend itself to exceptionalist explanations). Politics aside, however, there are objective features of Queensland’s political, economic and cultural history that really are different from the other states of Australia. Its unicameral parliament is one: for better or worse, the upper house of the Queensland Parliament, the Legislative Council, was abolished in 1922 when ‘Red Ted’ Theodore was premier, and no other state has ever followed suit. (New South Wales premier Jack Lang tried very hard, but without success, to emulate his Queensland counterpart.) The wider consequences of Theodore’s action have been debated ever since, but they may well have included a greater proclivity than elsewhere in Australia to producing an autocratic style of political



Introduction



and business leadership, and a tendency within the culture to admire the ‘strongman’ figures who embody it – figures like Theodore himself, like the mid-twentieth-century Labor premiers William Forgan Smith and Ned Hanlon, and of course like the National Party premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. But perhaps the most important objectively different thing about Queensland vis-à-vis the other states is its demographic decentralisation: a pattern of settlement and population distribution in relatively large provincial towns such as Toowoomba, Warwick and Dalby to the west of Brisbane, and Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville and Cairns to the north. This pattern, so different from the centralised patterns characteristic of all the other states, was a consequence partly of the late and gradual northward spread of grazing, agriculture and mining, and partly (as Regina Ganter has recently shown) of an important complementary movement southward by Malay, Melanesian and Chinese pearlers, merchants, miners and labourers.4 With the construction of industrial seaports at strategic points along 1,500 kilometres of coastline, and with a system of parallel west-to-east railways to service them, the conditions were set for relatively large and prosperous provincial communities across much of the state, and a proportionately smaller and less-developed capital city in Brisbane as compared with Sydney or Melbourne. Whatever its economic advantages, the educational and cultural effects of the diffusion of a small population and limited wealth away from a single centre to smaller towns and districts were ambivalent: strong regional infrastructures and cultures on the one hand; on the other, depleted educational resources and irregular contact with metropolitan and international standards of excellence in the arts. A further difference can be discerned in the dispossession of Indigenous people in Queensland. While in many respects this process followed the familiar pattern of colonisation throughout Australia, there were some important divergences. Queensland was not extensively settled until much later than the more populous states of New South Wales and Victoria; so when literature by Queenslanders began to be published in the late nineteenth century the frontier wars were already largely over in the southern states but still continuing in Queensland. The sustained intensity of the frontier wars in Queensland, the extreme harshness of

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Introduction

the environment, and a system of land tenure based on leases and small selections rather than large tracts of freehold land, combined to intensify those anxieties about origins, legitimacy and belonging which characterise colonial cultures. Moreover, many Queensland writers were born or spent substantial periods of time in rural areas, where such anxieties are most strongly felt. Yet another effect of belated settlement is the so-called ‘branch office’ phenomenon, whereby most of the old, established institutions – such as publishing firms – have based their head offices wholly and permanently in Sydney and Melbourne, using their Brisbane operations as little more than distribution agencies. This and other objective dimensions of the ‘Queensland difference’ may have begun to diminish in recent years with the continuing inflow of investment capital and of large numbers of interstate immigrants, creating more and closer continuities with the rest of Australia and gradually reshaping local attitudes and values. Queensland’s political culture in the post-Fitzgerald era has also begun to resemble those of the other states more, though, as both critics and admirers of Peter Beattie’s style of leadership often observe, some continuities with the ‘Joh era’ remain. As the reality of Queensland’s difference from the rest of Australia diminishes, so the ‘Queensland is different’ catchcry has also begun to fade, and one welcome result of this fading is a sharper and more curious sense of the internal diversity of Queensland’s landscapes, people and cultures, and also of the external connections and relationships Queensland has entered into – sometimes directly rather than through the Commonwealth – with other countries at various times in its history. Does Queensland need its literary history to be written, even at the risk of reinstating a myth of difference that now seems to be on the way out? Probably for most people with an interest in literature the answer would be ‘yes’, but perhaps with a little more uncertainty than if the question concerned not Queensland but Australia. Writing the literary history of a single Australian state inevitably suggests a search for a unitary defining essence in what is, after all, a fairly recent administrative artefact. People are right to be a little sceptical about attempts to ‘invent’ a literary tradition to fill the large right-angled triangle that happens to occupy the north-eastern quadrant of the continent.



Introduction

5

A Queensland literary history might, however – at least in theory – be written with an eye to the myth of difference itself, selecting for extended treatment those writers who have written a lot about Queensland as a distinctive place, developing themes that relate specifically to Queensland, and identifying continuities and connections that emphasise state-wide literary traditions and networks. Such a book would not need to be a crass exercise in state chauvinism. The actual existence of Queensland as a permanent, occasionally embattled, political entity for nearly 150 years means that certain kinds of state-centred thinking and feeling have come into being – witness the State of Origin! – and these have certainly found their way into literature. Indeed, two of Queensland’s finest writers, Thea Astley and David Malouf, both of whom figure prominently in this book, have at times expressed a strong sense of Queensland as a distinctive ‘state of mind’ – though it might be argued that their rather different senses of what comprises that state of mind are rooted in the primacy of more local personal memories and experiences: Malouf, for example, of Brisbane, and Astley of North Queensland. It goes without saying that any literary history of Queensland, whatever its orientation, needs to take full account of figures like Malouf and Astley, and indeed of ‘state-consciousness’ more generally as an important and legitimate part of the literary record. The question is whether ‘Queensland’ in that holistic sense should be the organising principle for a literary history of the state. The consensus of the editors of this volume and the contributors was that it should not be. Our feeling was that the exclusions and distortions that such a framework would be likely to impose, especially on our treatment of smaller regional literary communities within Queensland, but also on what might be said about the many individual writers for whom living in Queensland was a fact of no particular moment, made it an unattractive option. Indeed, it seemed that our best option might be to see if we could use the literary history of Queensland not to boost and consolidate Queensland’s image of itself as a whole and distinct entity but to scrutinise that image, to look beyond it, to question it, even to ignore it if that seemed the right thing to do. Instead of writing a history of literature for Queensland, we resolved to write a history of literature in Queensland. Such a history would be, above all, inclusive – which is not quite the same as



Introduction

‘exhaustive’: one that would (for example) acknowledge fully and fairly the important presence of regional, Indigenous, ethnic and women’s voices and literary traditions; and we hope we have managed to do that. But it is important to say that the book was not conceived as a history exclusively of or for the marginalised, the overlooked or the undervalued in our literature. Places like Britain, the United States, and for that matter Australia, can afford the luxury of literary ‘rescue operations’ of that kind. For them, the history of their literary mainstream has been thoroughly (if never exhaustively) documented, narrated and debated. But even some of our best-known older Queensland writers, figures like James Brunton Stephens, George Essex Evans, ‘Steele Rudd’, Vance Palmer, David Rowbotham and Thea Astley, have been sold a little short by the academy; perhaps only Judith Wright and latterly Rosa Praed have attracted the level of attention from literary critics and historians that their work deserves. Our mainstream writers, in other words, stand in almost as much need of critical recognition and historical inclusion as our marginal writers, and this has been a factor in determining the nature and scope of the present project. This is not the first history of Queensland literature, but it is the first for nearly fifty years; and the last one, Cecil Hadgraft’s Queensland and Its Writers (1959) could claim, with some plausibility, to have been the first.5 As it happens, Hadgraft himself made no such claim, freely acknowledging his debt to an earlier and bigger book, The Queensland Poets (190) by H. A. Kellow, though this book dealt only with poetry and not, like Hadgraft’s, with fiction and criticism as well. Kellow, in turn, had acknowledged a debt to – and some differences from – a slightly earlier book, not a history but an anthology of Queensland poetry, A Book of Queensland Verse (1924), edited by J. J. Stable and A. E. M. Kirwood, and with a substantial historical Introduction by Stable, the then Professor of English at the University of Queensland.7 Both Stable and Kellow attempted to find and identify an emerging ‘essence’ of Queensland in the history of its literature up to their day; and it is striking how very different were the essences they purported to discover. For Stable, the ‘true Queensland note’, first struck in the poetry of the 1880s, was a synthesis of Bulletin-style ‘bush nationalism’ with the respectable middleclass conservatism of the towns. For Kellow, a Scottish liberal who had



Introduction

7

migrated to Queensland twenty years earlier to be headmaster at Rockhampton Boys’ Grammar, the true Queensland note, emerging even as he wrote his book, was a radical optimism about the future, an openness to modernity, and a capacity for self-transformation – values he saw embodied admirably in the poetry of the now largely forgotten William ‘Baylebridge’ (Blocksidge). Cecil Hadgraft’s book – subtitled ‘100 years – 100 authors’ – is approximately a hundred pages long, less than half the length of Kellow’s opus. Like Stable’s anthology, which was timed to coincide with the centenary of the first European settlement at Moreton Bay in 1824, Hadgraft’s history was published by the University of Queensland to coincide with a public anniversary, the centenary of responsible government in 1859. But however official the occasion of the book, Hadgraft continues to charm and persuade with his wry humour and supremely confident and reasonable judgments. Unlike his two predecessors, Stable and Kellow, he makes no attempt to define an essence, an identity, a central tradition or an historical destiny immanent in Queensland’s literature. Ever the relaxed pluralist, he treats his hundred writers as fellow guests in a large and friendly guesthouse where ideological passions – of which there were rather a lot in 1959, the year of the state Labor split – seemed out of place. Confronting the task nearly half a century later of making sense of Queensland’s literary heritage, it seemed foolhardy to emulate our predecessors in their heroic single-handedness. The sheer quantity and diversity of writing produced in Queensland since 1959 made such an undertaking virtually impossible for a single author if anything resembling a comprehensive overview were to be achieved. Fortunately, the eightfold increase in the number of public universities in Queensland since then, with the consequent spread of scholarly expertise around the state, made it possible to distribute the research and writing throughout the length and breadth of the state. This enabled the editors to assign responsibility for different parts of Queensland to scholars with an immediate interest in the literary cultures of the regions in which they were living and working. One slight disadvantage of this collective, ‘consortium’ approach is the absence of a single ruling perspective on the material discussed. It

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Introduction

might have been possible (and then again, it might not!) to have drawn everything together by editorial main force applied before, during and after the writing of the separate chapters. The view of the editors (and also, not surprisingly perhaps, of the other contributors) was that coherence of this kind could not be achieved without seriously compromising the regional contributors’ discretion, and surrendering one of the book’s most attractive features, its multiple perspectives. The only requirements were generous quotation and jargon-free writing. Apart from that we were happy to adopt the Queensland Rail model of decentralised organisation. The main part of the book, then, is divided into regional sections. One of these regions – South-East Queensland – is very large and very diverse, and the section devoted to it is divided into chapters on Brisbane, the coastal hinterlands, and the Darling Downs. The other regional sections, on the literature of North Queensland, Central Queensland and the West, contain just one chapter each. In addition to the regional sections, there are also three chapters on special topics, which draw their material from the whole state, namely Indigenous writing, writing for children, and travel writing. Further special topics could obviously have been included (and some were at an earlier stage), but these three seemed like indispensable points of focus for our particular historical moment. The question arose, as it had to, of what our working definition of ‘Queensland literature’ should be. As to the category ‘literature’, we opted, editorially, for an open-ended definition, which meant, in practice, that each writer made his or her own decision as to the kinds of writing they would include in their chapter. There was one exception: an overall decision was taken, with some regret, to exclude dramatic writing from the survey. This has seemed at times a problematic exclusion, but it was felt in the end that finding the expertise for a properly informed historical treatment of drama across the state was simply not possible. As to the category ‘Queensland’, we decided to err on the inclusive side, and against imposing any strict birth or residential criteria, let alone any criteria of subject-matter or setting. At the edges of the category, this has meant, for example, that certain writers whose only connection to Queensland has been that they wrote about it have been included, especially if it seemed that their writing may have helped to shape a particular region’s sense of



Introduction

9

itself. Conversely, some writers who were born in Queensland but never wrote about it have also been included. In neither of these cases, however, have we attempted to be comprehensive in our coverage. A further consequence of the regional approach is that a number of writers have been discussed in more than one chapter. Since writers often move around in the course of their careers, occupying different positions – and sometimes writing differently – in different places and contexts, it seemed to make sense to accommodate those movements rather than decide, editorially, where a given writer ‘really belonged’. The multiple appearances of, for example, Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Vance Palmer and David Rowbotham have been monitored for factual consistency but allowed to stand; and those appearances can of course be easily traced through the index. A final consideration that should be mentioned is the span of time chosen to cover: 1859 to 2001. The starting year is hardly contentious. Given our reservations about foregrounding ‘Queensland-ism’, it might have seemed consistent to have started with 1824 (the establishment of the penal colony in Brisbane) or 1840 (the opening of the Moreton Bay district to free settlers), but it would have made so little practical difference to the content that it seemed a pity to sacrifice the convenience of a date that meant something to every region in the state. The ending date of 2001 is another matter. To have excluded the last six years of Queensland writing merely to satisfy a millennial fetish would certainly have been regrettable. There was a deeper reason for forgoing the pleasure of writing about, for example, the more recent novels of Nick Earls, Venero Armanno and Andrew McGahan, and that was our belief that a literary history ought to deal with the past, not the present, because the literary past has a value independent of the literary present or future; and that value labours under fairly constant pressure in contemporary Australian culture and needs to be reasserted from time to time. Bringing the story up to 2001 allows us to dip our toes into the new century; to have waded further in would have begun to interfere with the scholarly perspective all our contributors have sought to bring to the project, and to undermine the confidence that we and they – and more importantly, our readers – needed to have in the general reasonableness (which is not to say the finality or incontestability)

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of the critical judgments, both explicit and implicit, that have shaped and informed our work. This book has been an unconscionably long time coming. Another disadvantage of an academic consortium is that its members are not always able, with the best will in the world, to sidestep unforeseen distractions and hindrances to their research and writing. The editors are grateful to the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas (Griffith University) and the former Queensland Studies Centre (also Griffith University), to the Australian Research Council for their funding support, and to the staff of the Fryer Library (University of Queensland) and the John Oxley Library (State Library of Queensland) for their courteous assistance over many years. We would also like to thank the University of Queensland Press, in particular Craig Munro and Madonna Duffy, for the faith they showed in the project, and Professor Robert Dixon, now of Sydney University, for his painstaking reading of the whole manuscript at a crucial point in the process, and for the enormously valuable comments and suggestions he offered for improving it. But above all we are grateful to the contributors, some of whom completed their assigned tasks several years ago, for their patience and goodwill. We sincerely hope they will regard the final product as worth the wait.

PART 1: South-East Queensland

Roles for Writers: Brisbane and Literature, 1859–1975 Patrick Buckridge One risk of dividing Queensland’s literary history into regions is that it predisposes us to look for regionally distinctive qualities in the literature. In those instances where a regional character has indeed evolved over the years, there is clearly justification in doing so, but for the literature of Brisbane and its immediate surroundings that may not be the case. It is certainly true that in the work of David Malouf, Thea Astley and several younger contemporary writers Brisbane has been given a highly distinct and distinctive identity as a city – which is in part the subject of the next chapter. But this is a fairly recent phenomenon, a welcome and in some ways unexpected development of the last quarter of a century. For most of its post-settlement history Brisbane seems not to have been blessed (or cursed) with quite the same definite sense of itself that is expressed in the literary cultures of the other state capitals, and even in some of Queensland’s own regional towns. Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is the unusual frequency with which Brisbane, as a ‘built environment’, has had to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again. In 184, then again in 189, 191 and 1974, the city was devastated by floods (not to mention the great Queen Street fire, also in 184: not a good year!). In between disasters, its physical preservation has been in the hands of a succession of state governments of both political persuasions, each one – at least until the last twenty years or so – seemingly less concerned with heritage values than the one

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before. Even with greater public care and foresight than there was, the perishable fabric of much of Brisbane’s subtropical housing stock militated against the strong neighbourhood continuities so characteristic of the southern capitals (though of course many such communities were established in any case). The hilly topography of the inner suburbs and the serpentine course of the Brisbane River (both so well evoked by David Malouf)1 may also have played a part in inhibiting the establishment of strong neighbourhoodbased loyalties and solidarities, for these two factors – the hills and the river – both conspired to produce residential patterns in which people of different wealth and status lived in the same suburbs, property values often being dictated by elevation and river-access within suburbs rather than between suburbs or groups of suburbs. As Brisbane’s outer corridors and peripheries have filled, factors like these have become less important, but the older city, until well after the Second World War, was unusually mixed in character. It was, and it still is, a city in continual flux – socially, culturally, architecturally and (particularly in the decades around the turn of the last century) politically. Even its relationship, economically and politically, to the rest of Queensland and to Australia has been subject to constant change and uncertainty. Penal settlement, frontier outpost, busy port, advance-guard of socialism, cultural backwater, international military headquarters, sectarian battleground, hive of political reaction, home of the literary avant-garde: Brisbane has been all of these things and more over the last century and a half, some of them only briefly, others for longer periods. These are not the conditions one might expect would produce a flourishing local literature. Writers and readers alike, one might suppose, need a stronger, more settled sense of who they are, where they live and why they matter than Brisbane could easily have provided for them. And yet, paradoxically, it has been a very fertile ground for literature, at least since the time of ‘responsible government’ in 1859. Because of its unusually mercurial identity perhaps, Brisbane has not generated a great deal of writing in which the city itself is a prominent or unifying theme; but there is much that is closely descriptive of places in and around Brisbane, its local environments and its landscapes. And there is also evidence of a highly organised and vigorous network of



Roles for Writers

15

clubs and associations operating in tandem with a succession of dedicated individuals (both writers and readers), and significant support from schools, the university and the popular press.

The poet’s role in a colonial town: early endeavours Beginnings can be arbitrary affairs, but there is complete agreement among Queensland’s older literary historians – Stable, Kellow and Hadgraft – as to what should be designated the first work of literature written and published in Queensland.Their choice has a certain intrinsic rightness: it is a welcoming ode to Sir George Ferguson Bowen, first governor of the newly independent colony, published as a leaflet in Ipswich in December 1859, the year of Separation, and written by Charles Frederick Chubb, a young solicitor who had immigrated from southern England two years earlier. Technique is not one of Chubb’s strengths: his metres are sometimes wayward. But the formal diction of the ode is conventional for the kind of public (or rather, civic) poem it is. He celebrates the untapped mining and agricultural potential of the new colony – perennial Queensland themes indeed! Bless’d be the gales and fav’ring winds That brought thee, Bowen, to these shores, Where Nature wild her untold stores Of wealth has buried; where teeming mines, With sparkling gems, yet hidden from the gaze Of man’s quick searching vision, dwell in vain; Where glorious sunshine darts alone her rays On fallow ground, unbless’d with yellow grain. But (he continues) the new colony can also aspire, under Bowen’s governorship, to levels of public civility not shown by its ‘dubious nurses’, the uneducated local squattocracy of the 1840s and 1850s. A sense of political emancipation is also there, developed in the next stanza as ‘the happy day / When tyranny shall cease’: ‘the chain that rivets us to Sydney’ will be broken, and Freedom, Justice, Honesty and Reason will descend upon Queensland under the ‘majestic sway’ of ‘our bounteous Queen’.

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Most of Chubb’s other verse is more relaxed in tone, but it remains civic-minded and celebratory of the region – its economic enterprises and social pleasures alike. In just one of his later ‘prologues’, for example, he manages to touch on the dredging of the Bremer River (with a hint of Ipswich–Brisbane rivalry), the first railway line (to Grandchester), the production of cotton, silk, sugar and minerals, and the establishment of the Ipswich Grammar School: The sullen rocks fly from the Bremer’s bed, The Platypus, grown bolder, at Ipswich rears its head; And now the big ships come to see our beauties, We don’t want Brisbane to collect our duties. If towards the north our wondrous visions stray, The iron horse skims swift the iron way: The darling dears around very soon will see Young sparks from Darling Downs by rail for tea. No canes they import to our famed Grammar School, One ‘Hawthorne’ branch suffices all our sons to rule. Thus while with spirit we our energies display, The canes grow big with Hope at Cleveland Bay; And should they put fresh taxes on our tea, At all events we’ll try to get our sugar free. The lines are quaint, but it is hardly likely, in 1859, that they were unconsciously so, since their quaintness consists partly of locutions that would have looked old-fashioned in 1800. Above all, Chubb’s is a social Muse, and his cheerily extroverted verses, undistinguished though they may be, reflect a clear sense of the poet’s role in colonial society as a useful and entertaining one, to be acknowledged but not taken too seriously. Not surprisingly, Chubb went on to become the mayor of Ipswich and a prominent political and legal identity in the town; and he continued to write poems in much the same civic vein, publishing a collected volume, Fugitive Pieces, in 1881.2 If Chubb’s single-poem leaflet entitles him to be Queensland’s first published poet, the authorship of the first whole volume of verse goes to



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a poet of a different kind. Poems and Songs, printed in Brisbane in 189, was the work of a Scottish immigrant named Thomas Beaton Hutchison Christie (1829–79) writing under the nom de plume of ‘Ralph Delany’. Christie arrived in Australia in his early thirties, already a published poet and having belonged to a literary coterie in Glasgow to whom ‘Burns was as a god’;4 the bulk of his verse is in fact written in West-Country Scots vernacular. He was thus one of the earliest of a long line of ethnic Scots who exercised a disproportionate influence – cultural, political and commercial – in the Moreton Bay district until well into the twentieth century. Like many of them, he was employed by the Queensland Education Department. Another notable ‘first’ was George Vowles (184–1928), the author of Sunbeams in Queensland (1870), the first ‘currency’ poet to be published in the new colony. Born in Ipswich,Vowles led an adventurous early life in foreign parts, followed by a long, intensely bookish and solitary later life in Brisbane and Maitland, during which he immersed himself in English poetry. Paradoxically perhaps, given his native origins, most of his writing is saturated, some to the point of pastiche, with the ‘vernal beams’, ‘dappled skies’, ‘sylvan maids’ and ‘lowly swains’ of English neoclassical pastoral. But his subjects are often local, and his evocations of native animals especially can be engaging.Who could resist the charm of lines like the following? Hasting by them, lovely, mute, Is the gentle bandicoot. More commonly, though, the effects of Vowles’s natural descriptions are (probably unintentionally) comic: Often now in aerial track Ducks are noticed by their quack . . . Or to haunts in a lagoon Where mosquitoes with a tune O’er the lilied water go With a thirst for blood they know . . .

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(Vowles simply cannot dignify ducks, as witness the sublimely silly line: ‘Wild ducks made music in the sedge with bill.’) A common judgment on colonial writing like this has been that it betrays the writer’s lack of a sympathetic connection with their natural environment. But with Vowles, as with more gifted contemporaries like Marcus Clarke and Charles Harpur, the imaginative effort required to accommodate Australian realities to English descriptive conventions could sometimes produce a peculiar intensity of observation and response. Vowles’s sensibility was particularly attuned to private intensities. In this regard his sense of his own poetic identity was as romantic as Chubb’s was realistic, and as essentially individualistic as Chubb’s was essentially social. His interest in the civic and industrial achievements of his town and region is virtually non-existent compared with his interest in philosophical introspection. This dimension of his work is exemplified at its best in his most mature work, a long, partly autobiographical narrative poem called ‘The Sketch’, which traces, Wordsworth-like, the morally formative experiences of his boyhood and youth – truancy, schoolteaching, first love, and the rediscovery of religious faith.The verse is technically competent, and the thoughts, as Kellow commented, ‘profound enough for a young fellow in his early twenties’:5 And winter thou, unmindful of mine age, Hast from the cradle to the present hour Pursued me with thine unrelenting rage, As if eternal torture were my dower; And yet I grieved not; but in secret bower, In resignation over books of lore, My time expended, hopeful that the Power Who called me into life, whom I adore, Would take my care and smile upon me evermore. Chubb and Vowles marked out two alternative ways of imagining and enacting the poet’s role in colonial Brisbane: in civic terms or in Romantic terms. There was a third way, and that was the stance of exile and alienation in a harsh and inhospitable land, which was common enough



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in the popular ballads of the convict period, but present also in the more ‘literary’ writings of Irish immigrant-poets like Mary Eva O’Doherty, née Kelly (182–1910). In Ireland, under the pen-name ‘Eva’, O’Doherty contributed poems to the nationalist newspaper The Nation, expressing her love of Ireland and her passionate support for the ‘Young Ireland’ cause. Her fiancé, Kevin Izod O’Doherty, one of the leaders of the movement, was transported to Van Diemen’s Land after the 1848 uprising. After a comfortable confinement and an early reprieve, he returned to Ireland, married Eva, and emigrated with her to Brisbane in 180, where he established a successful medical practice and served as a member of both houses of the Queensland Parliament. Eva did not handle the change of scene with quite the same aplomb. Though she continued to write poetry for some years for the Freeman’s Journal, a Sydney-based Irish publication, it was largely Irish poems on Irish themes and places. Her imaginative adjustment to life in Brisbane was never fully accomplished, and her few poetic responses to the ‘blank, bright day’, the ‘cold and soulless glance’ of her adopted land, convey genuine bewilderment at what she perceived as a blank page, devoid of human tradition and culture.

The compleat colonial poet: James Brunton Stephens The literary careers, minor as they all were, of Chubb, Vowles and O’Doherty nonetheless established certain parameters for the entry onto the Queensland stage of James Brunton Stephens (1829–1902), probably the most important Queensland poet of the nineteenth century, and for a time, following the death of Kendall in 1882, Australia’s most prominent literary figure. Stephens was a more skilful, versatile and prolific poet than his Queensland predecessors, but the role he developed for himself in the colony combined public and personal aspects, while emphatically rejecting – as most of his Scottish compatriots did – any suggestion of alienation or exile. Stephens was educated at the University of Edinburgh. As a private tutor and schoolteacher, he travelled extensively in Europe and the Middle East before migrating to Queensland in 18, at an even later age than his compatriot Christie. Here he worked with the Education Department until his appointment to the public service, where he managed to cling, not without

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difficulty, to the post of acting under-secretary to the Colonial Secretary in Brisbane. His interests – like those of Arthur Hoey Davis (‘Steele Rudd’), another public servant by necessity – always lay elsewhere. ‘Public service’, however, is probably the main way in which Brunton Stephens’s literary career is now remembered, not only because his name was attached to a Queensland primary schools essay prize until the 190s but also because his most anthologised pieces are those formal, ‘forensic’ poems he wrote before and after Federation. One of these, ‘The Dominion of Australia (A Forecast)’, was first published as early as 1877! Another, the hundred-line ‘Fulfilment (Australia Federata, 1st January, 1901)’, he was allowed to dedicate ‘by special permission’ to Queen Victoria and it has acquired a semi-official status as the Federation poem. It is certainly no more turgidly allegorical than other poems of its type – much less so than most – and the opening stanza evokes quite dramatically the frustration and perseverance of those engaged, as he had been, in the long struggle for national unity: We cried, ‘How long!’ We sighed, ‘Not yet;’ And still with faces dawnward set, ‘Prepare the way’, said each to each, And yet again, ‘Prepare,’ we said; And toil, re-born of resolute speech, Made straight the path her feet should tread. It may be that only now, after a recent failed campaign to establish an Australian republic, are we able to appreciate the real intellectual work behind the triplet in which Stephens tried to define succinctly Australia’s new relationship to Britain – even as we acknowledge the vast change in that relationship (for most Australians!) since that time: No vassal progeny of subject brood, No satellite shed from Britain’s plenitude, But orbed with her in one wide sphere of good. Stephens also wrote abstruse philosophical poems of a ‘transcendental’ cast (‘The Story of a Soul’ and ‘The Chamber of Faith’, for example). But



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there can be no doubt that his real forte was humorous poetry, which in its various forms occupies about half the Poetical Works published by Angus & Robertson in 1912, ten years after the poet’s death. Some of these forms, unfortunately, have not travelled well, to put it mildly: his ‘comical’ satiric verses on Chinese cooks and Aboriginal women and girls make painful reading, and show that literary cultivation and a good classical education were not proof against racism. More pleasing are the wry reflections of a middle-aged man – the bus-conductor, it is finally revealed – on his loss of libidinous interest in his pretty female passengers (‘In a ’Bus: A Spring Contrast’), and the whimsical meditations of a selfconscious city-dweller in ‘A Brisbane Reverie’ (187), where the poet’s philosophical musings on the scene below him from his flat on Wickham Terrace are continually interrupted by nagging worries about his rent. With a dual apperception, metaphysical, profound, Past and present running parallel, I scan the scene around – (Were there two of us the attic front would only be a pound). – Beneath mine eyes the buried past arises from the tomb, Nor cadaverous or ghostly, but in all its living bloom – (I would rather pay the odds than have a partner in my room). How the complex now contrasteth with the elemental then! Tide of change outflowing flow of ink, outstripping stride of pen! (Unless it were . . . But no . . . They only take in single men). Where trackless wilderness lay wide, a hundred ages through – I can see a man with papers, from my attic point of view, Who for gath’ring house assessments gets a very decent screw. The ‘dual apperception’ (a piece of education-theory jargon from the 1880s) proliferates amusingly for a further thirty lines, the nervous, selfmocking complacency of which might be seen as announcing one of the central themes of Brisbane writing for a hundred years, namely that recurrent sense of the city’s urban culture as a rather thin veneer over an immemorial and surviving pre-colonial life and landscape. Stephens’s

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particular sense of that duality – of the precariousness of Brisbane’s ‘civility’ and the disturbing presence of its opposite – found serious poetic expression in his most ambitious and, during his lifetime, most critically acclaimed poem. Convict Once, published by Macmillan in England in 1871, is a verse novella. It tells (or rather, very obliquely and elliptically, it hints at) the melodramatic story of a sixteen-year-old girl transported for seven years for an unspecified crime of passion, who upon her release finds employment as governess to a family with three daughters. Despite her resolution to forge a new life (with a new and meaningful name, Magdalen Power), she betrays the eldest daughter of the family, Hyacinth, by surrendering to passion and seducing the girl’s beloved, Raymond, the son of a neighbouring family. The beloved’s father is an ex-convict, however, and Raymond is therefore unacceptable as a match for Hyacinth unless and until her father (who has thereupon unaccountably but irrevocably sworn an oath to this effect) should happen to propose marriage to an ex-convict himself. Soon after this, his wife falls ill and dies. Racked by remorse over what she has done to Hyacinth, Magdalen attempts suicide, is rescued, and revives sufficiently for her widowed employer to propose to her and for her to reveal her convict past, thus removing the obstacle to the union of Hyacinth and Raymond. She then dies. Convict Once narratively enacts the social incorporation of one kind of ‘incivility’, that of convictism itself, and the social exclusion of another, that of unlicensed sexuality. In this sense the poem can be read as a kind of foundation myth for middle-class Moreton Bay in its post-penal phase (notwithstanding the complete absence of local colour).Technically, it is a remarkable achievement, composed in a very demanding ‘classical’ form, a four-line stanza, with alternating rhymes and alternating line-lengths of seventeen and sixteen syllables (‘hexameters’, in effect), sustained faultlessly for eighty pages. The poem consists almost entirely of Magdalen’s monologue, and the verse form creates a fluttery, febrile voice, often importunate and prolix, sometimes rising to a pitch of hysterical intensity. Here she recalls her time in prison: Oh my soul! The delight, the delicious Pressing together of arms, and up-gathering of knees to the chin,



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And the spent air breathed for warmth ’twixt the breasts, while the darkness propitious Softer than wool wrapt me round with a dreamless oblivion of sin!7 And here she imagines in prospect her union with Raymond: This idle curl that I smooth even now betwixt finger and finger, Silkenly circling his own shall he press upon amorous lips; Yea on the yielding delight of this breast shall that conquered head linger, And ’neath the veil of these tresses lie hid in enamoured eclipse.8 The intense psychological inwardness of the poem is thus contained, Browning-like, within a deeply imagined consciousness not his own. Hadgraft even argues that the artificial poetic diction that characterises much of the poem is itself a character trait: that the ‘undulous pastures’, ‘contiguous umbrage’ and ‘vermeil suffusions’ are expressions of Magdalen’s own literary pretensions.9 It is at least clear that the introspection in the poem is ostensibly Magdalen’s, not Stephens’s own; and indeed Stephens did not approve of poets who were ‘always yowling about [their] souls’. In a letter to a younger Brisbane poet, Francis Kenna, whom he suspected of such yowlings, he wrote: To me it indicates lack of intellectual capital, lack of supplies from without, when a man has to turn round on himself and digest his own stomach. Such poems – and they are very prevalent nowadays – always suggest to me the ideas of a man with an Aeolian harp fixed in his bowels, which is played upon by the flatulence caused by his own emptiness.10 Stephens may protest too much: Convict Once does reveal that interest in morbid and pathological mental states that somehow epitomises the final ‘decadent’ decade of the nineteenth century. But above all, Stephens was a sociable being. He was closely associated with a number of literary organisations, including, for many years, Brisbane’s oldest ‘culture club’, the Johnsonian, named after the great Doctor.

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Stephens delivered a poem to mark its move to new premises in 1899, in which he advised the dinner guests, Take him for type who, wisdom’s hierarch, Retained the relish of the midnight lark; Take this for counsel, keep it to the letter – Be good as Johnson – but, oh, don’t be better!11

The Johnsonian Club, 1878–1998 The Johnsonian Club was founded in 1878, and may well have been the first of many around the world that have since been established in emulation of Samuel Johnson’s own famous eighteenth-century London ‘Literary Club’, whose members included Edward Gibbon, David Hume and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Brisbane’s Club was ‘instituted for the association of gentlemen connected with Journalism, Literature, the Drama, Science and Art; Medical Practitioners duly qualified; Barristers-at-Law; and Solicitors of the Supreme Court’.12 Of the founding group, however, most were journalists (like Gresley Lukin of the Courier and John Warde of the Telegraph) and teachers (like Stephens himself, then headmaster at Ashgrove Primary) who sometimes wrote for the newspapers.1 John Henry Nicholson (188–192), another founding Johnsonian, was for a time headmaster at the Enoggera Primary School. In the course of a long life, darkened by mental illness, he published some ten volumes, mostly of poems and prose sketches. But his reputation rests squarely on his novel Halek (1881) and its sequel, Almoni (1904). The novels tell the story of a young man, Halek (meaning ‘pilgrim’; all the names are of Hebrew derivation), and his lifelong pilgrimage, inspired by Turoni, his idealised beloved, from a fictive world of greed and incivility (Pagam) to a land of moral aspiration and spiritual effort (Karom) and finally to a place of spiritual perfection (Sahitam). The journey is completed by the end of the first book, and the sequel deals with Halek’s progressive initiation into a ‘worshipful brethren’ of spiritual adepts, his falling in love with the lovely Lirusan, and his return on a ‘mission’ to Karom and Pagam.14 Tedious as all this may sound, and despite frequent ‘thou hasts’ and ‘methinkses’, the work is surprisingly readable. Nicholson’s prose has a



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classical simplicity and musicality – what the nineteenth century liked to call ‘purity’. In a preface to a later edition, Nicholson says he had intended ‘to write a work which would combine the most engaging qualities of Robinson Crusoe with those of The Arabian Nights’,15 but The Pilgrim’s Progress is in some ways the more obvious model. Halek himself is very reminiscent of Johnson’s own Prince Rasselas, which is not surprising, given Nicholson’s Johnsonian Club connections and his particular admiration for the Great Cham himself. Both books sold well overseas and were translated into several European languages. In Brisbane, Almoni was enthusiastically reviewed and appeared with a Prefatory Notice praising the author’s ‘mastery of our tongue’, which was written by Reginald Heber Roe, headmaster of the Boys’ Grammar School and president of the Brisbane Literary Circle.1 In 192, the year of Nicholson’s death, the Bulletin ran two pieces, two months apart. The first, an obituary proper, was by Emily Bulcock, an early protégée of Nicholson’s, a fellow teacher and a rising young poet.17 The second, written by the radical unionist Robert Ross, a former pupil of Nicholson’s and printer of the second edition of Halek, commented that the book was ‘beautiful in manner’ but ‘commonplace in matter’, ‘redolent of the philosophy of the one-time British Workman’ and ‘far too prim and particular even for its own times’.18 One of the more unusual features of both the ‘Halek’ books is their preoccupation with the subject of poetry and ‘being a poet’. Social life, even in the debased land of Pagam, revolves around regular public performances, some of them fiercely competitive. Halek and his associates agonise about the technical virtuosity and emotional power of their own and others’ poems, and Halek’s return journey to Pagam clearly symbolises the civilising mission of poetry to a culturally deprived colonial outpost. There are even episodes to show the importance of honesty in literary criticism. Halek’s world embodies a kind of Augustan ideal in which poetry, music and the other arts all matter deeply and form the common staple of public recreation and discourse. Brisbane, we can be fairly sure, was never quite like that. But there were no doubt real enclaves that were – notably, perhaps, the Johnsonian Club itself, whose literary proceedings do seem to be allegorised at certain points in the narrative.

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On one Saturday night each month, the Johnsonians met at the Belle Vue cottage adjoining the Belle Vue Hotel in George Street (they moved to Elizabeth Street in 1898) to hear and discuss lectures on literary topics and readings of their members’ writings, and to dine in style.19 The ambience of the club, in a word, was clubbable, evoked in verses like these by the journalist Horace Earle: And when around the board we sit With pipe in mouth we’ll cast A thought upon the old press world, On him now in the past; On him whose work will ever live, That scholar true and tried – Old Johnson! prince of writers gone, Our patron and our pride.20 Manly bohemianism, however, was not to overstep the bounds of civility and propriety: No filthy talk nor song shall mar the pleasure Of guest or clubber, but in fullest measure Each shall in modest-wise the fun sustain, And with due heed the careful goblet drain.21 The Johnsonian Club occasionally extended a financial helping hand to indigent Australian writers. In this and other ways it promoted the cause of literature in general, and of Australian writing in particular, for at least the first 50 of its 120 years of life. It was not without its local critics, however, and was satirised (in both verse and prose) for its social and sexual exclusiveness in William Lane’s radical Brisbane journal The Boomerang and also in J. E. (‘Bobbie’) Byrne’s liberal and respectable Queensland Figaro.

Critics and visionaries of the 1890s Nicholson’s greedy and corrupt land of Pagam, for all its exotic Eastern flavourings, is also a vision of colonial Brisbane as observed from the elevated balcony of the Johnsonian Club. William Lane had an even darker



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vision of Brisbane as a place of corruption, exploitation and depravity, but Lane rendered it through realism, not allegory – and socialism, not poetry, seemed to him the likeliest remedy. Other prose writers of the period also looked at Brisbane with a reforming eye, anatomising its brutality and venality and proposing remedies. In 1894, the year after Lane’s expedition to Paraguay and the Great Flood, a Scottish physician, Dr Thomas Lucas (184–1917), published a two-volume utopian novel about Brisbane called The Curse and Its Cure. The first volume, The Ruins of Brisbane in the Year 2000, describes the evils of colonial Brisbane from the fictional standpoint of an early twentieth-century Australian who finds himself sailing up the Brisbane River at the beginning of the twenty-first century! This enables him to give a circumstantial account (to an interested American couple) of evils that have already happened in the Brisbane area (Aboriginal massacres, ‘blackbirding’, the 189 floods, and abuses in the public hospital) together with events that ‘will have happened’ by the early years of the following century – the ‘Battle of Lytton’, for example (Queensland’s decisive defeat by New South Wales in a civil war between the states) and the takeover of the Brisbane area by rampant lantana.22 Dr Lucas was part social critic, part poet, part naturalist and part medical maverick: he was the purveyor of a popular papaw-based typhoid treatment (Dr Lucas’s Lozenges) and an impassioned advocate of the new Christian Science persuasion. His utopian vision of reform – to be achieved by the year 2200, following ‘mighty convulsions of evil’ – revolved around the abolition of what he called ‘Churchism’, and its replacement by the free and rational exercise of Christian morality.2 The events of 189 figure rather more circumstantially in a poem by Henry Barkley of Coorparoo (185–192), an Irish-born railwayman, trade unionist and poet. Lyrics from the Line was published by the Railway Times Office, Ipswich, in 1898 under his regular pen-name of ‘The Goth’. ‘A Retrospect of the Year 189’ contains a digest of the events that excited an intelligent and committed socialist in that remarkable year: the election of fifteen members of the newly formed Queensland Labour Party to the Legislative Assembly, William Lane’s expedition to Paraguay, the release from St Helena of the twelve leaders of the Queensland Shearers’ Union jailed for conspiracy following the strikes of 1891, the floods

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that ‘swept Victoria Bridge away / And . . . decked many a ruined home in wreaths of foamy spray’, the extension of the franchise to women, the World’s Fair in Chicago, and the reading of the Irish Home Rule Bill in the British Parliament.24 Brisbane in 189 is also the setting for a popular novel, The Dis Honourable (1895), a murder-mystery cum courtroom drama cum romance which unfolds in the very midst of the catastrophic flood of that year. It is competently plotted for suspense and melodramatic effect, and written in a vigorous, no-nonsense style which was also very much the personal style of its author, John David Hennessey (1847–195), a Methodist and Congregational minister and religious journalist. Hennessey was a vocal critic of the political and business corruption that was rife in Brisbane in the 1880s and early 1890s, under the premierships of McIlwraith and Morehead, and these form the substance of the murder-mystery in which the corpse of a ruthless banker is found floating in a small dinghy in Moreton Bay. He had apparently been killed at the height of the flood in his mansion on the river, readily identifiable as the old Sydney House, and more recently the location of the Brisbane studios of the ABC. Corpses are a recurrent motif with Brisbane writers of the 1890s. Arthur Bayldon (185–1958), an uneven but sometimes impressive poet and short-story writer, agonises for some 200 lines on a related theme: Stretched on a dripping slab of stone A sheeted harlot lies alone, Brought in last night from where she lay Among the mangroves of the bay. I lift the sheet – God! What a sight Lies dark and ghastly in the light: The face is black, the bosom bare, The eyes oh! How they blindly stare With their last fixing of despair.25 Bayldon is also capable of an otherworldly lyricism, which was the dominant note of his earlier ‘pre-Australian’ poetry (he published two volumes before his arrival in Brisbane from Leeds in his twenties). But his mood



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of horror is irrepressible and can surround even the most innocent objects – witness his jaundiced view of the well-meaning mud crabs, denizens of those same mangroves that yielded up the corpse: They have smelt the tainted air From that body festering there. How they twitch their claws and pry Into each distorted eye. How they spit on him with spite As their nippers pinch and bite.2 Bayldon’s short stories are equally grim if less obsessive.27 The same might be said of the stories of Francis Adams (182–9), the radical young English journalist who came to Queensland for his health, wrote feverishly – poems, short stories, essays and books, and leaders for both the Courier and the Boomerang – and returned to England to die. More than Bayldon or Hennessey (both of whom lived in Brisbane for several years), Adams was interested in recording the experience of living in a particular style of house, in very specific (and to a Brisbane reader immediately recognisable) surroundings, at a particular moment in time. Australian Life, a collection of stories and sketches published in London in 1892, the year before his death, begins with a story, ‘The Red Snake’, in which the narrator, strolling down George Street, meets an old friend, a Mr Power. He later calls on him in the house on North Quay that Power shares with ‘his “mate” Carlyle’ (the double quotation marks are Adams’s). There they combine comfort and good cooking with a lovely prospect. The house is fairly large, divided into two by a passage down the middle. The whole of the left side is taken up by a big double room – study, sitting and dining-room in one – the far end opening out by two door-windows onto a broad veranda. Here in a variety of wicker lounges and easy chairs these luxurious bachelors are wont to smoke the best Manilla via Hong Kong cigars (imported free of duty) and look down, as from an eyrie, on the road beneath and the blue winding river and clustering South Brisbane beyond.28

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The sexual orientation of the household is entirely inexplicit, but the air of slight amorality, of living on the margins of accepted social norms, resonates with the main narrative, a reminiscence by Frank Melvil of a cold-blooded, single-handed massacre of some fifteen Aborigines on the central Queensland coast, carried out by him in revenge for the killing of his Aboriginal concubine and their child.The atrocity is not judged so much as excused and even romanticised by the imputed motive and by a Nietzschean sense of the frontier as a zone ‘beyond good and evil’.

Stories from the contact zone The uglier aspects of Queensland’s racial history are never far below the surface in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rosa Praed (1851–195), who was born and educated in Queensland but lived most of her adult life in England, was both prolific and explicit in representing and reflecting upon the colonial frontier from a woman’s point of view. The daughter of Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, an early Queensland colonist turned politician, Praed set sixteen novels in the fictional colony of ‘Leichardt’s Land’ [sic], which she described as a ‘transparent mask’29 for Queensland. Praed’s novels draw on her personal experiences of the frontier wars and early colonial life, which are also recounted, with some licence, in the autobiographical My Australian Girlhood (1902).0 As a child, Praed lived on the property next to the Frasers, who were killed by Aborigines at Hornet Bank Station in 1857, and her father led the subsequent reprisals. During her teenage and young adult years, she divided her time between her father’s property on the Upper Logan and the family home at Kangaroo Point in Brisbane. After the death of her mother in 188 until her marriage in 1872 she acted as the hostess for her father, who in 18 had been nominated by Sir George Bowen as a life member of the Legislative Council.1 Praed left Queensland at the age of 25 and pursued her literary career in London, soon building a formidable following as the author of a series of novels about ‘the Australian bush with its glamour, its tragedy, its pathos and its humour . . . the romance of the pioneer upheavings and the social makings of a new-born colony’.2 Beneath the ‘romance’, however, she exposed the corruption and pretentiousness of the colony’s politics, depicted the tormented lives of women in a harsh and masculine



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environment, and explored the colony’s violent origins. Aggression constantly breaks through the colony’s genteel surface, not just in the bush, but even in the vice-regal circles of ‘Leichardt’s Town’ (Brisbane): in Policy and Passion, Sir Hardress Barrington ‘compromises’ – and presumably rapes – Honoria Longleat, the premier’s daughter. The subplots of Praed’s novels often explore relationships between colonising whites and dispossessed blacks, although her depiction of relations between the colonisers and the dispossessed is ambiguous and inconsistent. In much of her earlier work she inserts episodes from the standard colonial repertoire of ‘Aboriginal’ stories, such as the elopement of a married woman with a lover: in Outlaw and Lawmaker and The Luck of the Leura (1907), Praed facetiously recounts a ‘Blacks’ Iliad’, in which Helen leaves Menelaus for Paris and causes inter-tribal warfare.4 Gradually, however, Praed begins to subject colonialism to critical scrutiny, not to advocate Aboriginal rights but rather to seek moral redemption for the white race. In Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land (1915), the title character explicitly accuses the colonial regime of the theft of Aboriginal land during a formal dinner for the inauguration of the new governor of Leichardt’s Land: ‘I don’t admire your glorious British record, I think it’s nothing but a record of robbery, murder and cruelty, beginning with Ireland and ending with South Africa.’ Lady Bridget here places herself outside the oppressor group by speaking as a member of the colonised Irish race, but soon colludes with Colin McKeith, the man she has described as an ‘invader’, ‘aggressor’ and ‘one of the Oppressors’, by accepting his proposal of marriage. Lady Bridget leaves McKeith after his brutal punishment of a couple of Aboriginal adulterers, but this episode serves primarily as a catalyst for a limited awakening by McKeith, in which he realises that his black servants are ‘better’ than himself: ‘in this at least that they had known how to love and cling to each other in spite of the blows of fate!’ Lady Bridget’s insight into colonialism at the beginning of the novel is developed only tenuously, but nonetheless the novel raises disturbing questions about the violent racial conflict underpinning Queensland society. An equally remarkable but very different instance of writing from the ‘contact zone’ is to be found in the career of Frederick Charles Urquhart (1858–195), a Scots immigrant to North Queensland, who became an

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inspector with the Native Police in the Cloncurry area in the 1880s, where he and his men committed acts of barbarity comparable to that described in Adams’s story. By 1917 he had risen to the post of Queensland Commissioner of Police and in that capacity went on to play a key role in crushing the Red Flag Riots in Brisbane in 1919.5 Urquhart wrote poems of a reflective and descriptive kind, published as Camp Canzonettes (1891).They dealt mainly with his time in North Queensland, and include a rather dispassionate account of a murder by Aborigines and the reprisal expedition he led. His musings on the landscape of his adopted land are similarly dispassionate, eschewing the alienation of the exile in favour of a commonsense appreciation of both Australia and Scotland: Pleasant are Austral’s forest glades, When the wattle is in bloom: And pleasant is a far-off land, The heather and the broom. One can’t say fairer than that! A Celtic poet of a very different stamp, though interested in some of the same themes as Urquhart, was Cornelius Moynihan (181–1915). Moynihan was born near Killarney in Co. Kerry, where he remembered, as a child of six in 187, seeing red-coated dragoons marching through the glens in pursuit of Fenian rebels. He arrived in Brisbane in 189, and at the age of twenty became assistant librarian at the Parliamentary Library in Brisbane, a post he held until his death. Moynihan was both prolific and precocious. His first book of verse was published under the Wildean pseudonym of ‘Vivian’ when he was eighteen, and his last, The German Armageddon: Ballads of the Kaiser’s War, in 1915, a few months after Gallipoli and before his own death at the age of fifty-four. In between, he published poems in a variety of local Brisbane newspapers, including Flashes, the Observer, Figaro, Punch, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Week, the Age, the Australian, and of course the weekly Queenslander. Some of these – they include occasional and memorial poems, political satires, and some narrative and reflective verses on Aboriginal themes – were published (probably privately) in a



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volume entitled The Bunyip of Wendouree and Other Poems (1910).7 The title poem of the volume is a very odd fantasy narrative, in which Rob Roy M’Gregor, a Scottish Highland chieftain transported for poaching, meets a Gaelic-speaking bunyip who deposits him with an Aboriginal tribe for forty-five years, then gets him to Ballarat just in time for the Eureka Stockade. The suggestion of a special bond of sympathy between the Irish and the Aboriginal people, based not only on a shared marginality to the British establishment but also on a shared sense of a spiritual dimension in the landscape, is borne out in Moynihan’s own later work. Moynihan’s two most ambitious productions were The Feast of the Bunya and Eureka. The first is subtitled ‘An Aboriginal Ballad’, and it is a narrative account in about a hundred eight-line stanzas of the three-yearly pilgrimage of the local tribes to Mobolon, the highest point of the Bunya Mountains, to feast on the bunya nuts. It includes, as digressions, several stories of the contact between white and black, including such events as the notorious massacre of some sixty Aborigines with strychninelaced damper on the Kilcoy run in 1842 and the Hornet Bank murder of the Fraser family in 1857. The ground bass to these horrors is the steady and peaceful movement of the tribes towards Mobolon, leaving their puzzled prey behind them: Boonara’s hills are silent, Nanango’s valley lone; In all the spacious marshland No boomerang is thrown. The wild fowl haunt Cooloola, With fish the rivers teem; But now, no torches flash by night Along Barambah’s stream. The dingo, unmolested, May slake his thirst at noon; Unharmed, the swan at midday Floats on the broad lagoon; Round the salt spring at nightfall, The timid curlews shriek;

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Unhurt, the duck-billed platypus Tunnels along the creek.8 Moynihan’s closest model for the work is Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (he was a great admirer of Longfellow, and wrote a memorial poem in his honour), but it is a remarkably original and finished achievement in its own right. In hindsight we can hardly fail to see anticipations of Jindyworobak verse, but the diction remains relatively uncluttered, and Moynihan’s honest and thoughtful attempt to integrate the recent histories of Aboriginal and European populations on a single plane may achieve in practice what the ‘Jindies’ of the 1940s only preached. Contemporaneous critics and reviewers were generally favourable, though some jibbed at the burden of Aboriginal lore and language included in the notes. It gained, in any case, an enviable degree of official recognition when it was presented to the Duke and Duchess of York on the occasion of their Federation visit to Brisbane in 1901.9 Their Royal Highnesses would no doubt have been less pleased to receive a presentation copy of Eureka, even though it is more than twice the length of the Feast of the Bunya. One hardly needed to travel to the other side of the globe to hear stories about Irish rebels! Partly because Peter Lalor himself was Irish (and the brother of one of the ‘Young Ireland’ ringleaders, James Fintan Lalor), Eureka was a favourite topic with Irish poets and readers in Australia in the late nineteenth century, and Moynihan’s 2,000-line effort is one of the more impressive renditions. It remains unpublished: the reader for Ward Lock in Melbourne was impressed by its narrative energy and technical virtuosity, but regarded the subject as ‘too parochial’!40 Like many Brisbane poets of the fin de siècle, Moynihan had an elevated and idealised conception of the poet as bard, prophet and moral conscience. Arthur Bayldon describes it well: The poet sows his goodly seed Along the tracts of wrong; And clasps around each kingly deed The trappings of his song. New tidings of old truths he spreads



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From jaded clime to clime. The ceaseless spinning of the threads That weave the robes of Time Is heard on that colossal height On which he sits alone, Undazzled by the blinding light That streams from the unknown.41 Especially among immigrant writers, that Romantic self-concept often foundered on the harshness, drabness and philistinism of the new country, resulting in a deep-seated pessimism and disenchantment. In Moynihan, perhaps because of his Irish adaptability and sociability, the sense of poetic mission, the conviction that there were things worth writing about in Australia, seems to have been more robust and lasting. But even his Irish optimism could sometimes falter: Alas, we have no Byron now! No minstrel touch to wake the lyre! Do these degenerate times allow Of deeds that should the bard inspire?42 By an intriguing coincidence – intriguing enough, I hope, to warrant a thirty-year lurch forward in time – Con Moynihan may well have been the natural father of one of the least optimistic of all the Brisbane writers who have tried to make sense of the Queensland frontier experience of the 1840s, including the frequent murderous conflicts with the Aboriginal people. Brian Con Penton (1904–51) was born in Wooloowin, in a house owned and rented by Moynihan to the Penton family, with whom he lodged.4 Penton attended Brisbane Grammar, worked as a reporter on the Courier, and moved to Sydney in his mid-twenties with his wife Olga, née Moss (1897–197), where he worked on the Sydney Morning Herald, and later the Daily Telegraph, of which he subsequently became editor. The first of Penton’s two published novels, Landtakers (194), tells the story of Derek Cabell, a young English immigrant who arrives in the Moreton Bay convict settlement in 1842, and spends his patrimony



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on sheep which are then stolen by the cunning and sadistic overseer, McGovern – a mix of Simon Legree and Patrick Mayne.44 Cabell allies himself with an Irish convict called Gursey, and together they recover the sheep and flee the settlement, believing, wrongly, that they have killed McGovern. They manage to drive the sheep some 400 miles to the north-west, where Cabell establishes a huge holding, endures extreme hardships, and commits horrific deeds, including a reprisal-massacre of the local Aborigines. In the course of twenty years Cabell becomes very rich, makes several enemies but no friends, marries Emma Surface, a dark, brooding woman whose convict past is concealed from him by Gursey, and has children by her. But above all – and the novel is insistent about this – he changes: he is physically coarsened, mentally narrowed and morally brutalised by his experiences. And the state of his mind and soul after twenty years – cunning, greedy, incapable of love, trust or friendship, still emotionally attached to the Old Country and alienated from the new – is a major component of the Australian psyche that Penton believed had continued to evolve, by conscious hypocrisy and later by unconscious denial, into his own period of the 190s.45 Such backward-looking pessimism was uncommon, however, among writers around the time of Federation, for most of whom (most of the time) the floggings and massacres of earlier years were subjects to be avoided, if not categorically denied, for the sake of the new nation and a new civility. Women had always been entrusted with disproportionate responsibility in relation to the latter project especially, and since poetry was seen as a major civilising agent it is perhaps no surprise to find in the years leading up to Federation a significant cohort of ‘women of letters’ emerging in Brisbane.

Federation women poets From the 1890s a growing number of Brisbane women had appeared on the literary stage. Typically, their work appeared first in local periodicals like the Queenslander, the Courier, the Daily Mail, Steele Rudd’s magazines, the Worker, the Queensland Christian Standard and the Catholic Advocate (later the Catholic Leader). These publications catered for literate working-class and middle-class audiences, sometimes with particular



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interests (such as labour politics or Catholicism), rather than for an intellectual elite, so it is hardly surprising that experimental writing is rare among Brisbane women writers prior to the Second World War. The poet Mary Hannay Foott (184–1918) – the first woman to make a living as a professional writer in Brisbane – was born in Glasgow and educated in Melbourne. Prior to her marriage in 1874, Foott had supported herself through publishing prose and poetry in Melbourne and Sydney periodicals such as Punch, the Town and Country Journal and the Australasian Sketcher. Her husband died in 1884, and it was after this that she edited the women’s page of the Queenslander for about a decade, from 1887. (In this capacity she interviewed the novelist Rosa Praed in 1895, when Praed revisited Queensland for the first and only time.)4 In 1885 Foott published a volume of poetry, Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems, which in 1890 was reissued in London, together with new poems, as Morna Lee and Other Poems. This volume contains the poem for which she is now best known, ‘Where the Pelican Builds’, which poignantly evokes the experience of women waiting for men who never returned from their journeys westward to a place ‘sometimes spoken of by the bushmen of Western Queensland as the home of the pelican, a bird whose nesting place, so far as the writer knows, is seldom, if ever found’: They had told us of pastures wide and green, To be sought past the sunset’s glow; Of rifts in the ranges by opals lit; And gold ’neath the river’s flow . . . But the waters of hope have flowed and fled, And never from blue hill’s breast Come back – by the sun and sand devoured – Where the pelican builds her nest!47 Here, and throughout her work, Foott develops a public poetic voice that is distinctively female. She even published some of her work under the pen-name ‘La Quenouille’ (‘the distaff ’), in a clear acknowledgment of her ‘gender consciousness’. Foott’s poetic project is to make European culture ‘at home’ in a

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colonial setting. She moves seamlessly between themes drawn from Queensland life on the one hand and European high culture on the other: translations of Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo appear alongside poems about colonial hardships such as drought (‘Where the Pelican Builds’ and ‘In Time of Drought’) or the attacks of the ‘savage horde’ (‘Up North’). In ‘The Future of Australia’, she admits to nostalgia for ‘the legends of olden days’ – that is, for European culture – but urges instead the creation of an Australian literary nationalism: Sing us the Isle of the Southern Sea, – The land we have called our own; Tell us what harvest there shall be From the seed that we have sown.48 Through her role as women’s literary editor for the Queenslander, Foott participated in and fostered the rapid development of organised literary activities that occurred in Brisbane at the end of the nineteenth century. The development of a triumphalist version of Australian history fed the prophetic nationalism so popular around the time of Federation, and Foott’s work exemplifies the way in which women writers were able to emerge with self-assurance as public poets. Mabel Forrest’s first book of poems, Alpha Centauri (1909), draws much of its inspiration from nationalist fervour: the title comes from the name of the double star that is the chief pointer to the Southern Cross. In her introductory poem Forrest apologises that her ‘star of poesy’ is dimmer than she would have wished, but assures the reader that her patriotism burns brightly: Another star I shelter in my hand; Shut close between the pages of my book, The Star of Love a woman bears her land!49 Alpha Centauri includes some poems on urban subjects, such as ‘Ready Mades’ and ‘The Poster Girl’, but most of the works are romantic treatments of bush themes or stirring calls for the ‘development’ of Australia. Fear of invasion from the north is the inspiration for ‘Australia



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Undefended’, which calls Australians to take up arms to defend their land from an unspecified (but clearly racial) threat: Arm the empty North that drowses by its tide-washed sandy slopes; There is iron in the ranges, there is silver in the stopes, There is wealth undreamed – your birthright – in the country’s scattered parts, There is grit and honest courage in your people’s loyal hearts. Oh! the fair-maid country calls you, as she crouches in the sun, That you keep her honour stainless with the power of your gun!50 A recognisably Queensland environment is central to a number of Forrest’s poems, including ‘A Song of the Blue Skies’, ‘Creeks Out West’ and ‘The Call of the North’. Self-consciously and conventionally patriotic as these poems may be, they are on the whole more interesting than most of the works collected in Forrest’s later Poems (1927), which on the one hand tend to draw heavily on the world of ‘faerie’, and on the other further a conservative political agenda as exemplified in ‘The Worker’: ‘Lord! Keep my hand to the plough!’51 The prolific and popular Emily Coungeau (c. 180–19) exemplifies a new, self-consciously ‘cosmopolitan’ type of woman writer who emerged in Brisbane in the early twentieth century. Born in Essex, she became a ladies’ companion, travelling extensively in the Mediterranean and becoming fluent in five languages. She migrated to Australia in 1887, and in 1889 married Naoum Coungeau, an Albanian restaurant keeper whom she had met on the island of Lesbos.52 The couple moved to Brisbane, and from 1889 until 1919 they operated a wine saloon in Petrie Bight. From 191, Emily Coungeau – who was then over fifty – began to publish poems in the Brisbane Courier, the Sydney Bulletin and the Australian Woman’s Mirror. Her poems were later collected into four books, Stella Australis (1914), Rustling Leaves (1920), Palm Fronds (1927) and Fern Leaves (194). Princess Mona (191), a ‘romantic poetical drama’ that glorifies Australia’s sacrifice at Gallipoli, became the libretto for an opera entitled Auster, with a score by Alfred Hill. In high-flown, sentimental verse, Coungeau addresses an eclectic range of subject matter,

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including world events, war and peace, womanhood and mythology, but her main preoccupation is contributing to ‘Australia’s national hymn of progress’.5 Her agenda is explicitly racial: Australia, the ‘younger child’ of the ‘Empire Mother’, is populated by the ‘lineal sons of Norsemen’ and the need to ‘fill Australia with our kin’ is set against the danger that ‘through portals wide the alien hordes may pour’.54 In ‘Discovery of the Brisbane River’, which was entered into a 1924 competition to mark the centenary of John Oxley’s voyage up the Brisbane River, Aboriginal people are ‘savages’ overawed by a superior civilisation: Over barbaric beauty, Silence hung, Save for some startled woodland denizen, Or beat of splendid wings, far mounting, when Round graceful curves the Pioneer barques swung, Freighted with Celtic and Saxon kin to dwell, Where Dawn wakes blushing ’neath a silken dome . . .55 However problematic her imperialist and racialised conception of the poet’s role in colonial society, there can be no doubt that Coungeau, like Moynihan, enjoyed an appreciative local audience for her work. One poet for whom this was almost certainly not the case, but whose belief in his poetic vocation would have been quite undiminished by that fact, was William Blocksidge or, as he called himself for the last ten years of his life, ‘William Baylebridge’.

Bard without a tribe: ‘William Baylebridge’ William Blocksidge (188–1942) attended Brisbane Grammar School and, being of independent means, dedicated his life to the cultivation of his Muse. That Muse took him to England at the age of twenty-five, where, over the next ten years, he privately published at least eight books of poetry (possibly as many as thirteen, there being five announced titles with no extant copies) and a book of stories, Seven Tales (191), all in small, privately printed editions. In 1919, having worked in British Intelligence during the Great War, he returned to Brisbane, where he published, with Gordon and Gotch, a volume of Selected Poems (1919) and two years later a collection of stories and sketches with a Nietzschean flavour and



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a curiously stilted, ‘epic’ style, centred on the Gallipoli campaign: it was called An Anzac Muster (1921). Of his other two major published works, the first, Love Redeemed (195), a remarkable sequence of love sonnets, is somewhat reminiscent of Meredith’s Modern Love in style and subject – a doomed love affair – but much more strongly, in its densely compacted thought and syntax, of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Indeed, Baylebridge often seems not to imitate Shakespeare so much as engage with him directly, poet to poet, sometimes ‘matching’ the latter’s tortured self-scrutiny, with presumptuous but by no means always embarrassing results. The second major work was This Vital Flesh (199), a collection of philosophical poems and apothegms expressive of a personal brand of Nietzschean vitalism, with something of a Fascist tint (‘Truth not the squalid hand of Demos knows’). It contains, however, what might be regarded as his best single poem: H. M. Green called it, with some justice, ‘among the most beautiful that has come out of Australia’:5 I worshipped, when my veins were fresh, A glorious fabric of this flesh, Where all her skill in living lines And colour (that its form enshrines) Nature had lavished: in that guess She had gathered up all loveliness. All beauty of flesh and blood and bone I saw there; ay, by impulse known, All the miracle, the power, Of being had come there to flower. Each part was perfect in the whole; The body one was with the soul; And heedful not, nor having art, To see them in a several part, I fell before the flesh, and knew All spirit in terms of that flesh too. But blood must wither like the rose: ’Tis wasting as the minute goes; And flesh, whose shows were wonders high,

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Looks piteous when it puts them by. The shape I had so oft embraced Was sealed up, and in earth was placed – And yet not so; for, hovering free, Some wraith of it remained with me: Some subtle influence that brings A new breath to all beauteous things, Some sense that in my marrow stirs To make things mute its ministers. I fall before the spirit so, And flesh in terms of spirit know – The Holy Ghost, the truth that stands When turned to dust are lips and hands.57 Baylebridge died in 1942, and both of these latter works, together with a collection of earlier prose and verse, were reissued in a Memorial Edition in 191, under the terms of his will, edited by P. R. Stephensen in one of Stephensen’s last literary enterprises. The literary quality of Baylebridge’s work remains an unsettled question, about which there is simply no critical consensus among older literary historians. At one end of the spectrum stand H. A. Kellow, Tom Inglis Moore and P. R. Stephensen, all of whom regarded him as close to a genius. At the other stands Brian Elliott, who considered his work pretentious, affected and obscure, but who still acknowledged him as ‘sometimes a very good writer’. In between stand Judith Wright, Cecil Hadgraft, who found him ‘the most puzzling of Queensland poets’, and H. M. Green, who cannot finally decide whether Baylebridge ‘was a minor talent enlarged by an immense determination and enormous pains, or a major talent, handicapped by an effort overstrained, a taste insufficiently cultivated, and an element of the counterfeit’.58 If anything of Baylebridge’s poetry survives, it ought probably to be the two stanzas quoted above. To his posthumous chagrin, however, it is more likely to be flashes of oxymoronic brilliance like ‘That dark and bright beatitude of brown’59 or quaintly localising lines such as these from his earliest volume, Moreton Miles:



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By Brisbane stream, that ebbs and fills Through the city of brazen hills, Full many a jocund flower’s there grown; But like my love no other one. I am not afraid to bring her to town: I brought her from Bundamba down, My Logan lass, unto the town . . .0

The Great War and after A number of Brisbane writers from the early years of the last century, especially the men, seem to have been loners like Baylebridge. One whose early career ran parallel with Baylebridge’s was Peter Austen (1892–199), another, slightly later product of Brisbane Grammar who also wrote under a pseudonym: born Rudolph Novak Augstein, he changed his name by deed poll in 1917. Austen was involved with the ‘Progressive Christian’ movement before the war, publishing poems and reviews in the movement’s local magazine, The Modernist.1 On the outbreak of war he enlisted, and saw three years of active service with the Army Medical Corps. After his return to Australia he published two volumes of war poetry. He returned to Egypt in 1920, where he converted to Islam, and died in Cairo just before the outbreak of the Second World War.2 ‘Victory’ is one of a handful of poems from Austen’s second volume, The Young Gods (1919), dedicated to Rupert Brooke, that bear comparison with some of the best poems of the Western Front. It follows, with cinematic clarity, the progress of a reconnaissance patrol through a tiny French village destroyed by Allied bombardment, eventually coming upon an uninjured child beside its dead mother: The child, with tiny fingers bold, Plays with its mother’s torn silk scarf, And catches at her hair’s red-gold, With mischievous laugh! He, chuckling, scrambles thro’ the door, And grasps a loosened, bloody braid;

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A lizard slides across the floor, With wond’ring eyes of jade! More disturbing – and perhaps disturbed – is Austen’s nightmare vision of a danse macabre in the poem ‘Valse Triste’: How the glazing dead eyes stare! See, a man with shattered chest, Clutches to his bloody breast Some brave youth whose eyes are gone! How they gaily whirl upon All the dead ones lying there; How they stare!4 Vance Palmer (1885–1959) mined a similar vein. Later to become one of Australia’s most respected men of letters, Palmer also published two volumes of poetry while he was living and working in Brisbane, first as a reporter for the Brisbane Courier and later as a teacher at Clayfield (Boys) College. The Fore-runners (1915) evokes very passionately the core national theme of the Bush as a beautiful but yet-unloved landscape, and The Camp (1920), drawing on his experience of the trenches of the First World War, now finds evil and horror in the Bush, but also his best hope of recovery. His best-known war poem, ‘The Farmer Remembers the Somme’, expresses a quiet desperation reminiscent of Thomas Hardy at his best: Will they never fade or pass! The mud, and the misty figures endlessly coming In file through the foul morass, And the grey flood-water lipping the reeds and grass, And the steel wings drumming. The hills are bright in the sun: There’s nothing changed or marred in the well-known places; When work for the day is done There’s talk and quiet laughter, and gleams of fun On the old folks’ faces.



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I have returned to these: The farm, and the kindly Bush, and the young calves lowing; But all that my mind sees Is a quaking bog in a mist – stark, snapped trees, And the dark Somme flowing.5 Vance Palmer may have been in Brisbane for a time, but one suspects he was never quite of it, in the way his older sister, Emily Bulcock, was. In his Golconda novel trilogy, begun many years after he and his wife Nettie had left Queensland permanently, Palmer conveys the same lack of interest in Brisbane as a city, as does the hero of the trilogy, Macy Donovan – union activist, Labor politician and eventually state premier – for whom Brisbane is merely where he needs to be in order to attend Parliament, having been elected MLA for Golconda (a fictional mining town that has affinities with Mount Isa, as Donovan does with E. G. Theodore), and where he happens to be when his personal and political life begin to fall apart. Only in the second novel, Seedtime (1957), set mainly in Brisbane in the late 1920s (when the Palmers were living at Caloundra), are some parts of the city rendered with some particularity: New Farm, Toowong and the streets around Parliament House. And in a significant scene, Macy Donovan attends a performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie; frustratingly, the theatre is not named. The cultural scene in Brisbane in the 1920s, in which Emily Bulcock played a prominent role, was no place for literary loners like Palmer; increasingly it was for joiners, debaters, clubbers, academics, aesthetes and entrepreneurs of high culture. There was even something of a bohemian fringe. The spirit of the 1920s in Brisbane was in certain respects epitomised by Amedeo Luis Pares. Born in 189, the son of a Catalonian businessman in Mareeba, Pares became an accomplished musician and came to Brisbane in 192 to teach the violin. Four years later he arranged a concert in the Exhibition Hall (now the old Museum) in which 1,00 violinists took part. It was billed as ‘The Thousand Violins’ and attracted worldwide press attention.7 In the same year, 1927, Pares established the Hall of the Muses in George Street. This became the hub for much of the cultural life of the inner city: club meetings, recitations, play readings and small concerts

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were held there regularly. A monthly magazine was published, The Muses’ Magazine, edited by Pares. It featured some fiction and poetry but mainly essays on art, literature, music, drama, architecture, horticulture, meteorology and astronomy, together with regular reports on the activities of clubs and societies such as the Brisbane Shakespeare Society, the Dickens Fellowship, the Queensland Authors and Artists Association, the Royal Queensland Art Society, the Brisbane Repertory Theatre Society, the Workers’ Educational Association, the Lyceum Club, and organisations representing the German, Polish, French, Greek, Italian and Jewish communities of Brisbane. Frequent contributors to The Muses’ Magazine throughout its eighteen months of existence included Henry Tardent (Swiss horticulturist, littérateur and polymath), weatherman Inigo Jones (on clouds, rainbows and Charles Dickens), Professor Jeremiah Joseph Stable of the University of Queensland English Department, the poets Mabel Forrest and Edith Mary England, and sometimes Pares himself, on a variety of literary topics. The Magazine’s primary readership was clearly Brisbane’s cultural and intellectual elite. But the richness and diversity of that culture – as reflected, coordinated and no doubt stimulated by the Magazine – were notable, and were a point of pride with Pares, who listed all the affiliated organisations on the front cover of every issue, and editorialised in the first issue in praise of the university (‘a fecund nursery of energetic and learned professors’) and the government radio station 4QG for their cultural initiatives, also making the surprising claim that ‘among all the Australian cities Brisbane has the largest number of societies devoted to the study of foreign languages and literatures’.8 In 1929 The Muses’ Magazine went the way of many other such enterprises in the early Depression years, but many of its affiliated clubs and societies survived, notably the Queensland Authors and Artists Association (QAAA) (founded in 1921). The university connection remained important. Professor Stable, a president of the QAAA – and a key figure in many other cultural organisations, including the Alliance Française – had edited, with his English Department colleague A. E. M. Kirwood, an important anthology of Queensland poetry in 1924.9 He was also Chief Military Censor for Queensland through the second half of the war, and had (like the poet and Police Commissioner Frederick Urquhart) played



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an important and somewhat distasteful role in Brisbane’s ‘Red Flag’ riots of March 1919.70 Brisbane’s literary/military nexus was oddly close in the 1920s (as it would be again, in a very different way, in the 1940s). Stable’s deputy in the English Department (and a successor as QAAA president in 19) was Dr F. W. Robinson (‘Doc Robbie’), also a man with military connections. Robinson was mentor and patron to the Queensland University literary magazine Galmahra, which was particularly strong in the 1920s, its founding decade, and which survived until 195.The name is an Aboriginal word for ‘messenger’, and it was chosen by P. R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen, its founder and first editor, as a nationalist rebuke to Sydney University’s Eurocentric equivalent, Hermes.71 The magazine was later edited by a series of soon-to-be-prominent journalists and academics: Colin Bingham (192, 1925), Cecil Hadgraft (1924) and Edgar Holt (192); and it published poems and articles by Jack Lindsay, Brian Penton and Eric Partridge. Lindsay and Penton, in particular, tested the university’s tolerance with poems of a frankly erotic cast, and in May 1921 the authorities did in fact suppress the first issue because of Lindsay’s poems. As this excerpt indicates, they were certainly explicit: Her body shook beneath me. In her breast’s fall and rise I felt the mighty ocean of desire Swell to the calling moon . . . Her impulsive thighs Press tighter to my sides like petals that close About a trapped bee, entering too far.72 Judging by the sheer number and variety of clubs that were active in the 1920s, most of them with at least a partial cultural remit, Brisbane seems to have been a lively place for readers and writers. Apart from the formally constituted bodies affiliated with the Hall of the Muses, there was a flourishing bohemian subculture of youthful radicalism on the periphery of the university (then in George Street in the City).Young scholars, freethinkers, and poets like Jack Lindsay and ‘Inky’ Stephensen taught Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) classes in English literature at the beginning of the decade, wrote poems and articles for Galmahra, and

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rubbed shoulders with WEA radicals like T. C. Witherby, with American ‘Wobblies’ like James Quinton, and with some of those very Russian immigrants on whose activities Professor Stable, in his military censor’s hat, kept a suspicious and punitive eye.7 As those last instances suggest, the political and civil conflicts of Brisbane in the 1920s, stormy as they sometimes were, seem not to have impinged nearly as much on its literary culture as they did in the 1890s. One looks in vain for a Henry Barkley to immortalise the self-denying obedience of the ‘Suicide Club’ in the Upper House in 1922, or a Con Moynihan to attack the financial corruption of the McCormack administration of the late 1920s. (Vance Palmer’s Seedtime, written thirty years later, contains penetrating commentary on some of the political, industrial and sectarian issues of that place and time; but the relations between fact and fiction in the trilogy are far from simple.) For better or worse, Brisbane writers in the 1920s seem – as writers – to have turned a blind eye to political, class and sectarian struggles, preferring to write of love and landscape, even when – as students, teachers, journalists, unionists and bureaucrats – they were actively engaged in those sterner struggles on every side. Only Mabel Forrest and Emily Coungeau, in this decade, maintained something of a public dimension in their poetry, and it was largely ceremonial and celebratory in character. The metropolitan daily newspapers contributed to a lively but apolitical literary culture.The Brisbane Courier, though reactionary in its politics, and less literary in its inclinations than the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, nonetheless ran a regular ‘literary leader’ every Saturday, usually written by J. Scott MacDonald (1875–1944), in conscious emulation of the betterknown Walter Murdoch in the Melbourne Argus. These regular essays of some 2,000 words apiece were intelligent, allusive, occasionally ponderous but often witty explorations of particular literary-historical topics (AngloSaxon poetry, Shakespeare, English diarists, Robert Burns) and of books and reading generally. Both Brian Penton and Ray Lindsay, Jack’s younger brother, were also on the staff of the Courier in the 1920s, but their radicalism, such as it was, created few waves (though Lindsay was later sacked for a description of a Council meeting that never took place).74 Brisbane’s other morning broadsheet, the Daily Mail, had published occasional poems for some years, and its first postwar editor, William



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Farmer Whyte (1879–1958), ran a literary column and a substantial literary page for about four years (1918–21).75 But it was the evening broadsheet (as it was then), the Telegraph, that was most actively supportive of local writing, especially after Colin Bingham (himself a published and prize-winning lyric poet of the traditional school) became its Literary Editor in the mid-190s. Even before that, in 191, a regular Saturday feature called ‘The Poem of the Week’ was established, either by the then new editor Walter Cummins or by his immediate predecessor, a man who rejoiced in the name Martin Luther Reading; it was probably the former, the latter’s name notwithstanding.7 Many local poets gained some public exposure by this means, but one in particular, ‘Brian Vrepont’ (whose real name was Benjamin Truebridge), seems to have gained rather more than his fair share of the limelight, publishing some seventy poems in the Telegraph under Bingham’s indulgent eye. But despite this instance of cooperation between writing and the daily press, there were growing tensions in the Brisbane literary scene of the 190s.

The 1930s, Meanjin and Catholic poetry After 19, the more literary morning broadsheet, the Daily Mail, merged with the Brisbane Courier to become the Courier-Mail. Firmin McKinnon (1881–195), for many years the literary editor, reviewer and finance writer for the Courier-Mail, personified the dead weight of literary conservatism for a fresh wave of writers. Brian Vrepont’s relationship to McKinnon developed an edge of real personal animus through the 190s. Vrepont was the most radical, and probably the best, of the new arrivals. In appearance and lifestyle, he was the typical ‘decadent’ of an earlier generation, with a mysterious past to match. Clem Christesen later described him as ‘over six feet, slim, with a thin sun-tanned face and deep-set eyes, his grey-silver hair brushed back from a fine forehead’.77 Most of his poems are passionate responses to nature, underpinned by a form of ‘pagan’ pantheism, and extending, politically, to a form of revolutionary pacifism. There was also a satiric and polemical strain in his writing, sometimes directed against establishment figures like McKinnon, and sometimes against Catholic poets like Paul Grano. In 199 Vrepont won the C. J. Dennis Memorial Prize for ‘The Miracle’, a long philosophical poem about the evils of land-clearing and

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soil erosion, published singly in that year. It is an uneven poem, wordy and portentous, but with passages of real power. Another memorable poem of Vrepont’s, ‘The Apple Tree’, was described by Douglas Stewart as ‘perhaps the most beautiful lyric ever written in Australia’ (a slightly surprising judgment, given the obvious comparison with John Shaw Neilson’s surely superior poem, ‘The Orange Tree’). This is the first of its three stanzas: A maiden sat in an apple-tree, Oh, and the blossoms round her! A maiden sat in an apple-tree, ’Twas there that I found her, ’Twas there in a dapple of sun, In a smother of snowflake petals, I saw her swinging Her feet and singing ‘One, two, three – one, two, three – one, Two, three’, To the fall of the apple petals: Ah, me!78 This poem would appear as the first item in the inaugural issue of Meanjin Papers in Brisbane in 1940, the enterprise for which Vrepont, together with Clem Christesen, Paul Grano and James Picot, is best remembered. While Meanjin was in some respects a direct response to the outbreak of war, it also represented a culmination of tendencies that had been developing in the Brisbane literary scene through the latter half of the 190s. In particular, the idea of the writer as at the very least socially engaged, if not politically committed, had been gaining greater currency with the Depression at home and the rise of Fascism overseas. James Picot, despite being the first to propose the idea of ‘Meanjin’, was the least political of the four. A seventeen-year-old British emigrant in 192, Picot’s passion was for poetry, and he lectured widely in the 190s for radio and writers’ organisations, championing the English ‘moderns’. His own early poems adhered to earlier English models, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, but later, as he announced to his friend Paul



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Grano, he ‘accepted Australia’, and wrote vividly of his youthful labours in landscapes of ringbarked trees, whose ‘wooden antlers pierce the fleshy leaves / Of prickly pear clumps, and a ruby fire / Eats at the cores of logs’.79 In 1944, at the age of thirty-eight, he died on the Burma railway, and a collection of his poems, With a Hawk’s Quill, was published by Meanjin in 195. Paul Grano arrived in Brisbane from Sydney in 192. A Victorian by birth, a Melbourne law graduate and a devout and somewhat militant Catholic, Grano’s importance for the history of Brisbane writing is less his short-lived association with Meanjin (he fell out with Christesen very soon after the first issue, and severed his ties with it) than his unflagging dedication to the cause of Catholic literature in Brisbane, of which he was one of the founding spirits. More than any Brisbane poet before him, Grano presented himself to the world as a Catholic poet, and did much to establish a separate and coherent Catholic literary movement in Brisbane. In 194 he became the literary editor of the Catholic Advocate, and in that capacity started a weekly poetry competition – ‘the winner to receive the munificent sum of ten shillings, which I paid out of my own pocket’.80 In 195 he formed the Catholic Poetry Society (CPS) which produced a journal, The Southwellian, containing a selection of members’ verse. Contributors included Grano himself, James Devaney, Frank Cranny-Francis, Martin Haley, Paula Fitzgerald, Peter Miles and Joseph O’Dwyer, most of whom contributed to Meanjin, and all of whom continued to write through the war years and into the postwar period. The CPS folded in 198, a casualty of political tensions caused by Grano’s support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and only one issue of the journal appeared. In 1945 Grano revived his project, founding the Catholic Writers and Readers Society, again with a journal, Vista, now ‘open to anyone who could supply suitable articles in prose or verse’. Grano’s dream, both before and after the war, was to initiate an Australian version of the English Catholic literary revival of Chesterton, Belloc and Baring, and in 1945, to that end, he edited, for Angus & Robertson, a sizeable anthology of ‘Australasian’ verse by then-living Catholic poets in Australia (forty in all) and New Zealand (six). Its purpose, he wrote, was ‘to bear witness to the existence of a Catholic indigenous literature which is making a

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not unworthy contribution to the national literatures of the two countries’. Catholic poetry, for Grano, was distinguished by ‘its awareness of the spiritual values in life – a reflection by the poets of the primacy of the spiritual over the material – their vision of all things sub specie aeternitatis’,81 a criterion that could include most of Grano’s Brisbane co-religionists, as well as the 7-year-old Australian Celtic Twilighter, Roderic Quinn, the New Zealander Eileen Duggan, and many more. A measure of the Church’s support for the book is the Foreword written by the eminent Irish Jesuit academic George O’Neill, formerly of the National University of Ireland, a man who had ‘talked poetry’ with Hopkins and Bridges, listened to Yeats, ‘been fairly intimate’ with an imposing list of Dublin literary personages, and introduced to college life ‘a very small boy destined to regrettable celebrity as the author of Ulysses’.82 In Brisbane, the wealthy Catholic layman John P. Kelly founded the Aquinas Library in 19. Grano’s own verse is less memorable than his devotion to the cause of creating a vibrant Catholic culture in Australia. His best-known poems are meditative descriptions like ‘Walking Samford Way’, but the steely austerity of his poem ‘The Church’ seems to capture a more distinctive facet of Grano’s personality: She who was mine In the year’s making Has bound me Beyond my breaking She is a lover I resent and cherish. I cannot escape her Though I perish. Though I reject her I am hers for ever, Customed by bond Death cannot sever.8



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Given the focused intensity of his Catholicism, it is slightly surprising that Grano was also for many years a main contact for the Jindyworobak movement in Queensland, and that he maintained long literary correspondences on philosophical as well as organisational matters with Rex Ingamells, the South Australian founder of the movement, and the peripatetic poet and journalist Victor Kennedy. Grano’s own work shows few signs of Jindyworobak influence, but his older literary associate, the poet and former Marist brother James Devaney (1890–197) is often seen as one of the movement’s major precursors because of the interest he showed in Aboriginal culture and mythology in his collection of short stories, The Vanished Tribes (1929), and in some of his later poems. Devaney’s own verse, however, is generally more personal and Romantic in its spirituality and more traditional in form and diction than that of either the Meanjin group, the ‘Jindies’ or even the ‘Catholic Revival’ group. A poet of nature above all, his constant themes are Wordsworthian: the loss and partial recovery of his delight in the natural world, and the quest for transcendent vision. His tone ranges from dark despair in the earlier volumes to wistful nostalgia in the later. Poor few faint minor chords, breathing of sorrow! No art of laboured thought Adorns the simple notes I did but borrow From songs that came unsought.84 His earliest collection, Fabian (192), contains a long ode, ‘The Lost Lover’, an impressive imitation of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ ode, with a touch of Celtic Twilight. But most of his output consists of short lyrics. Devaney was a close friend, mentor and the first biographer of the poet John Shaw Neilson, who lived with him for some months at his home in Corinda in the year before his death in 1942.There are some affinities with Neilson evident in Devaney’s devotion to the lyric, but little of the greater poet’s visionary joy. Devaney had a modest, retiring nature, but he was a man of strongly held views. Despite his own lifelong Catholic faith, for example, he was sharply critical (as Brian Vrepont had been) of the sectarian literary politics of Paul Grano, Martin Haley and their Catholic cohorts, especially

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as it progressed, in the postwar period, towards what he regarded as anticommunist hysteria. Though generously represented himself in Grano’s Catholic anthology Witness to the Stars, he confessed to Clem Christesen that ‘I can’t make out the raison d’être of the thing at all, unless it’s just Catholic Action. It’s certainly full of “bullsh” from priests, nuns and Haleys’.85 Writing in Brisbane throughout the interwar period looks, in retrospect, like an embattled, demoralised and internally fractured enterprise. Writers who, if they had stayed in Queensland, might have helped to create a flourishing literary culture, like ‘Inky’ Stephensen, Jack Lindsay, Brian Penton, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Edgar Holt and the Catholic schoolgirl poet Ernestine Hemmings (who became Ernestine Hill) left Brisbane forever, while those who remained or arrived were too few, too old, too young or too mediocre to light the fire and keep it burning. There are individual exceptions to this harsh generalisation. The poetry of William Baylebridge and Brian Vrepont is one and the literary essays of Scott MacDonald another. Some important organisational initiatives were also undertaken: the establishment of the Queensland Authors and Artists Association in 1921, for example (though its generative capacities were stifled during its first two decades by the dead hand of the academy), and the formation of the Catholic Poetry Society. The overall picture of this period, however, is depressingly devoid of literary highlights.

The Second World War and its aftermath The 1940s presents an altogether brighter literary prospect. Brisbane was socially transformed to a greater extent than any other Australian capital city by the outbreak of the Second World War, especially after the massive ‘invasion’ by American servicemen from early 1942, when Brisbane became not just a convenient R&R destination but the operational headquarters for General Macarthur’s campaign in the Pacific. The radically changed environment saw the birth of exciting new initiatives and the appearance of some major new talents. When Meanjin Papers published its inaugural bi-monthly issue in December 1940 – just eight pages of poems by the four founding contributors – Clem Christesen articulated his sense of the new magazine’s purpose in the regional literary terms suggested by its short-lived subtitle,



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‘Contemporary Queensland Verse’. This was the period of the ‘phoney war’, when it still seemed important to ‘strive to “talk poetry” . . . at a time of “war and transition” ’.8 By number 8 (March 1942), Meanjin’s ‘Crisis Issue’ – with Singapore overrun, Darwin bombed and Australia facing invasion – ‘talking poetry’ no longer seemed quite sufficient; and by number 20 (March 1945), on the eve of the journal’s translation to Melbourne University, the original focus on ‘Queensland verse’ had gone forever (somewhat to Paul Grano’s dismay), and Meanjin had become ‘a magazine of ideas, built around literature and art’, aiming to ‘develop cultural contacts with other countries’.87 Christesen later described the Brisbane of 1940 as ‘a deadly place for an aspiring writer to live in’, and even the relatively traditional and parochial first issue was scolded by Firmin McKinnon, and ridiculed by the irrepressible Randolph Bedford (MLA), for its surrender to poetic modernism: ‘Much of it, pretending to be lyrical, is merely impressionistic prose cut into poetic lengths.’88 A contemporary poet that Firmin McKinnon did like (enough to write a long and fulsome Foreword to a volume of his poems) was Ernest Briggs (1905–7), the Courier-Mail’s music critic, a popular children’s broadcaster for some twenty years on radio 4BK, and the author of as many as ten slim volumes of published (some self-published) verse. Briggs is a poet of the short meditative lyric, a ‘singing’ poet, often aspiring to and derivative of W. B. Yeats (whom he revered), and at his best almost comparable with Shaw Neilson, but too often vitiated by a neurasthenic and sententious self-consciousness: When sunk in sad or wistful mood I leave the crowd for solitude, The melodies that best can please Are those that breathe simplicities . . .89 The example is characteristic, if not quite fair: the gesture of retreat to a simple lyricism is typical, although at times less affectedly done; and it is what McKinnon and others praised as the preferable alternative to modernist elitism and obscurantism: it was what the novelist and reviewer Roy Connolly called – clearly intending only praise – ‘the

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limpid grace . . . and facile charm of his lyrics’.90 Briggs was not entirely the prisoner of the anti-modernists, however, and was not averse to some formal experimentation himself, especially when music was his model: a notable example is the ‘monometrical’ poem ‘Out of the Silence’, which he composed in honour of Harriet Cohen’s performance of the Bach Prelude in C major: I am; I know; I feel; I grow; I think; I choose; I plan; I use . . . And so on, for another sixty lines!91 But he is also capable of a certain gnomic beauty, reminiscent of Marvell: Only the thought That is an ache in rhyme Can overthrow The enmity of time . . .92 Interestingly, although Briggs’s work may not have been highly regarded in Brisbane literary circles in the 1940s, it appears to have been so nearly everywhere else. His 1949 volume quotes testimonials from a remarkable constellation of literary names, including John Drinkwater, Rabindranath Tagore, Dame Clara Butt, John Masefield, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and the Oxford University Review; the last of these asks, ‘Why do we call Mr Briggs a poet? Because he persuades us that he sings because he must’. Other opinions from Australian reviewers – J. K. Ewers, Douglas Stewart and Frederick Macartney – are equally favourable. And indeed it was Meanjin Press that published his first book of verse, The Merciless Beauty, in 194. Judith Wright, who was then living in a rented room in New Farm and working for Meanjin in her spare time, thought of him affectionately



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as ‘endearing little Ernie Briggs’, but considered the publication of his ‘vague and inflated poems one of [Christesen’s] less successful early testings of the waters’.9 She was soon to meet her husband and soulmate Jack McKinney, and was already working on the poems that would comprise her first book, The Moving Image (194), a few years later. A literary history of Brisbane is hardly the place to attempt a just appreciation of the work of one of Australia’s three or four greatest poets, especially considering that Wright’s early life experiences – so crucial to all her writing – were garnered in rural New England, and that she moved away from Brisbane permanently soon after the war, first to Mount Tamborine and later to Braidwood, near Canberra. But the years that she did spend in Brisbane (1944–48) had a real importance for her: it is, after all, the place she was living in when her first book of poetry was published, when she met her husband, and when she wrote most of the poems for her second, ‘break-through’, book, Woman to Man (1949), which celebrated their love with a physical and emotional intensity previously approached by perhaps only one other Australian woman poet, the Brisbane-born Zora Cross (1890–194). Judith Arundell Wright (1915–2000) is a poet of intense, unremitting confrontation with the great fundamental truths of human existence: birth, love, time, death and suffering; and the landscape that symbolised those truths most powerfully for her – her ‘blood’s country’ – was always New England, ‘that tableland, high delicate outline / of bony slopes wincing under the winter’ – well south of Brisbane, the unnamed and unregarded locus of her ‘days’ circle’ in that much loved and anthologised poem.94 Indeed the brash, dirty and dangerous city that was Brisbane in the 1940s – so well evoked in later years by Estelle Runcie Pinney’s novel A Time Out for Living (1995) – seems to have bored and repelled Wright, though serving her at times – usefully enough, poetically – as an infernal antithesis to the things she valued. A few of her finest early poems are characteristically imperious transmutations of the ordinary social debris of the city into the hieratic symbology of fire, acid, blades, flesh, blood, bread and bones that she increasingly made her own. Some, like ‘Metho Drinker’, achieve a highly distinctive blend of power and compassion:

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Under the death of winter’s leaves he lies who cried to Nothing and the terrible night to be his home and bread. ‘O take from me the weight and waterfall of ceaseless Time that batters down my weakness; the knives of light whose thrust I cannot turn; the cruelty of human eyes that dare not touch nor pity.’ Under the worn leaves of the winter city safe in the house of Nothing now he lies. His white and burning girl, his woman of fire, creeps to his heart and sets a candle there to melt away the flesh that hides the bone, to eat the nerve that tethers him in Time. He will lie warm until the bone is bare and on a dead dark moon he wakes alone. It was for Death he took her; death is but this and yet he is uneasy under her kiss and winces from that acid of her desire.95 Judith Wright was a loner, but what she did share with some of her Brisbane contemporaries and predecessors was a very elevated conception of the role and function of the poet. Even as early as Woman to Man, she had begun to develop an idea of the poet as a crucial agent for revitalising the dead specialisms of modern life and thought with the transforming, synthesising power of metaphor, an idea she elaborated in a lecture, three years later, with a formidable array of anthropological, linguistic and philosophical references.9 Her poem ‘The Maker’ embodies, rather than expounds, her symbolic selfconception as poetic seer: My days burn with the sun, my nights with moon and star, since into myself I took all living things that are. All things that glow and move,



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all things that change and pass, I gather their delight as in a burning-glass; all things I focus in the crystal of my sense. I give them breath and life and set them free in the dance. I am a tranquil lake to mirror their joy and pain; and all their pain and joy I from my own heart make.97 Blake,Yeats and – in the early volumes – the Eliot of the Quartets are all audible in Wright’s poetry, modified and enriched by her personal matrix of symbols and by an unmistakeable ‘sibylline’ quality of voice which is like no other Australian poet before or since. Interestingly, though, in her criticism she defined her own poet-hood, implicitly, with reference to two Australian writers, both of whom had a Brisbane connection. One was William Baylebridge, whose genuinely ‘Shakespearean’ grandeur she was one of the few to recognise, whose vitalistic vision she acknowledged and respected, but whom she judged, finally, to have betrayed that vision by a lack of personal humanity, tolerance and self-knowledge. John Shaw Neilson, by contrast, possessed those qualities and others in abundance, and her admiration for his poetry was immense. But she also acknowledged (without for a moment condemning) its intellectual circumscription, and almost certainly saw in her own work a potential synthesis of Baylebridge’s elevated style and intellectual reach with Neilson’s direct lyrical freshness and emotional honesty.98 Brisbane’s wartime literary scene, especially during the time of the American ‘invasion’ of 1942–44, was a welter of cultural forces and influences, reflecting in part the dizzying social upheavals of those years, when a sleepy semi-tropical city of 50,000 had swelled to half a million – including 85,000 American troops – by 194. Meanjin was a clearinghouse for most of the new and exciting literary currents; consequently,

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by war’s end its horizons had extended so far beyond Brisbane and Queensland that the move to Melbourne when it came (in 1945) was almost a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, at their home in Dutton Park Clem and Nina Christesen played host to Brisbane’s literary birds of passage, both local and exotic, including uniformed American poets like Karl Shapiro and Harry Roskolenko, who brought a fresh, cosmopolitan and avant-garde perspective to bear on Australian literature. The Christesens also acted as local mentors for the young literary radicals of Barjai (194–47), a new, mainly avant-garde literary journal that originated with a group of senior students at Brisbane State High School and ran for twenty-three issues.The group included Barrie Reid, Laurence Collinson, Charles Osborne, Thea Astley and Don Munro, and while Reid and Collinson in particular established lasting connections with those icons of the southern avant-garde, John and Sunday Reed and Max Harris, the writing they published was determined less by a programmatic modernism than by the youth of the writers: contributors had to be under twenty-one!99 The sixteen-year-old Grace Perry’s lines, for example, might almost have been written by Emily Bulcock: Petals of prisoned sunlight Gilt with the sunset gold Yours is the smiling glory, Yours is the tale untold.100 (‘Marigold’) The ‘elliptical and vaguely surreal urban vision’ of Barrie Reid, however, is more characteristically ‘Barjai’: Walked there with tears for I Was angry and cold like tears, seeing The Southside girls, their fear fleeing, Drunkenly dancing with one great cry.101 (‘At Brisbane, Anger’) The mixing of old and new idioms, even in Barjai, reflects the persistence of literary traditionalism in Brisbane during the 1940s, bolstered as it was by the polemical advocacy of individual poets like Devaney and Haley, and the continuing strength of Brisbane’s ‘Catholic revival’, but also by



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the active presence of the QAAA on the Brisbane scene – the ‘Arthurs and Marthas’ as they were irreverently called (or even less reverently, the ‘Horses and Arses’) by those older writers, some of them returned servicemen, who attended the fortnightly meetings. Two such writers, John Blight (191–1995) and Val Vallis (b. 191) found temporary support and solidarity in the QAAA, but the more important influence for all of them, especially Vallis, was the mentoring and advice of Douglas Stewart who, as editor of the Bulletin’s Red Page during and after the war, published most of their early poems. Vallis was born and grew up in Gladstone, the son of a local ‘wharfie’ and fisherman, and his first book of poems, Songs of the East Coast (1947), expressed a passionate attachment to the place and people. He also wrote some fresh glimpses of wartime Brisbane, but his best, and best-known, poems, such as ‘Michael’ and ‘The Netmaker’, are heartfelt tributes to his father, and to the magic of a vanishing way of life. His hands were delicately fingering harp-strings As he leaned above the taut ropes on the fence, And his ear was low to the float-line, hearing there In this strange instrument his time-loved song – 102 (‘The Netmaker’) Vallis’s later poetry has a more wistful and inward cast, somewhat shaped by the melancholy lyricism of Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold and Charlotte Mew, and by Shaw Neilson, whose poems he co-edited with Judith Wright in 19. It insists, as they do, on the intrinsic beauty and human meaning of natural things: The dark wind blows from the sea; The tremor of grass is grey, The blind thorn fingers the wall, The torn wave cries to the stone.10 (‘At Tintagel’) If Vallis’s poetic output was slim, his importance for Brisbane’s postwar poetic culture was disproportionately great. This was because he both embodied and disseminated, through thirty years of teaching aesthetics and poetry at the University of Queensland, a powerful and distinctive

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conception of poetry that combined an intense Romantic sensibility with a gruff realism; a devotion to international high culture (especially opera) with an equal devotion to the local and the ordinary; a respect for the great literature, art and music of the past with a love of what was unique and unprecedented in the present. John Blight, like Vallis, wrote more about the regional landscapes of his early life – especially the beaches around Maryborough and Bundaberg – than he did about Brisbane, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. He produced eight substantial volumes of poetry between 1945 and 1980, two of them – A Beachcomber’s Diary (19) and My Beachcombing Days (198) – consisting of ninety ‘sea-sonnets’ each, including (in the earlier volume) the much-anthologised ‘Death of a Whale’. In formal terms, Blight was an odd mixture of tradition and innovation, and his gaze could veer disconcertingly between scientific precision and personal revelation. Greatly admired by other poets, in particular by Judith Wright, Blight’s jagged rhythms, abrupt transitions and studied impersonality are an acquired taste, and one that not everyone can acquire. Some of his most arresting work is the prose poetry of his later years. In one prose poem, with an almost zoological detachment, he describes himself in his ‘natural habitat’, the house near the top of a hill in the old Brisbane suburb of The Grange, where he lived for thirty years: I live in a one-way street, and turning back is a hazard, so my autobiography will never be written, few memories kept. My hill is an island. I wander around its street, happy this loop on my hill holds fast. I meet myself often when I stroll; but like the hour-hand of a clock always as I am, never as I was.104 (‘Greenway Street’) For Gwen Harwood, who lived in Brisbane until the end of the war, by chance contrast it was precisely herself-as-she-once-was whom she encountered near one of the city bridges twenty years later, in the summer of 195:



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By the old bridge in flaring sunlight A ghost is waiting, with my face Of twenty years ago, to show me The paths I never can retrace.105 (‘In Brisbane’) Youngest of the group of poets who returned to Brisbane from the war was David Rowbotham (b. 1924), like Vallis and Blight a beneficiary of Douglas Stewart’s mentoring from afar, and an exponent for much of his career of the literary values Stewart advocated – lyrical brevity, a controlled intensity of emotion, and above all an attachment to the landscapes of personal memory, which for him are Toowoomba and the Darling Downs rather than Brisbane. Later in his long and as yet unfinished career, when living in Brisbane, tutoring at the University of Queensland, then working as Literary Editor for the Courier-Mail, Rowbotham’s poetic interest in Brisbane began to focus on its early history as military garrison and gaol. In some of his best Brisbane poems he relates the town’s brutal past to the official corruption and political timidity he saw in its present. In a typically compacted phrase, he concluded that because of its penal history Brisbane ‘lacked the ethical and tough; it still repeats the meek and musket age’.10 That poem was written in the 1970s, in a political context very different from that of the 1940s, and in tune with a more radical generation of poets. It nonetheless echoes a diagnosis developed by the Brisbane-born writer Brian Penton, especially in his second novel, Inheritors (19), in which the Brisbane of the late nineteenth century is depicted as a town obsessed by the need to conceal the misdeeds of its founders, and to perpetuate their lies. Prior to the Bjelke-Petersen years, however, that kind of critique was uncommon among Brisbane writers, and certainly the Brisbane scene in the immediate postwar period, following Meanjin’s departure and the exodus of writers like Wright, Harwood, Astley, Reid and Collinson, seems to have witnessed a determined move away from politics and war towards the personal, the vital, the local and the beautiful as preferred literary themes. The 1950s brought a surprising change of direction.

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The fifties and after Every cultural decade has more going on inside its arbitrary bounds – more loose ends from the past, more half-formed impulses just emerging, more marginal voices, and more difference and division among the main actors – than generalising overviews take account of. The popular stereotype of ‘Fifties Australia’ is one of rampant materialism, cultural philistinism, conservative politics, and the suburban ethos: a time, as Patrick White notoriously put it, in which ‘beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves’.107 Yet by a strange inversion, the literary scene in fifties Brisbane was dominated by a single poet, a communist activist from a patrician Victorian family, with a Cambridge education and elite cultural tastes. The poet was John Manifold. Manifold arrived in Queensland in 1949 at the age of thirty-four, and established himself the following year in the outer bayside Brisbane suburb of Wynnum North, where he lived, with his wife Kate, until his death forty-five years later. As William Hatherell has observed, Manifold’s career reversed a familiar pattern, evident in figures as diverse as ‘Inky’ Stephensen, Vance Palmer, Gwen Harwood, David Malouf and Peter Porter, of moving from youth and young adulthood in Brisbane to exile and fame interstate or overseas. Manifold arrived with an international reputation already forged overseas in the 190s and 1940s, and stayed.108 His best-known poem, the majestic and much-anthologised ‘The Tomb of Lt John Learmonth, AIF’, was written some years before he arrived in Brisbane, but its opening lines convey something of his characteristic austerity and commitment: This is not sorrow, this is work: I build A cairn of words over a silent man, My friend John Learmonth whom the Germans killed. Manifold erected and occupied a public, supra-personal role as a poet for perhaps the first time since Baylebridge. But Manifold constituted that role very differently from his reactionary and reclusive predecessor: not as



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a visionary, prophet or mystic, but as a worker in words, one whose task was to build poems and songs to assist the Australian working people in their struggle. ‘Learmonth’, however, is not a didactic poem; indeed ‘messages’ of any kind are rejected as false. Manifold calls his hero’s doomed, back-to-the-wall heroism on Crete ‘courage chemically pure, uncrossed / With sacrifice or duty or career’, and concludes: I could as hardly make a moral fit Around it as around a lightning flash. There is no moral, that’s the point of it . . . But he was not always so reluctant to preach. Manifold took his role as a communist poet seriously, and that sometimes meant placing his politics on the page, particularly through his devotion, as collector, composer and historian, to the tradition of the bush ballad, which he saw as an important manifestation of the revolutionary elements in Australian consciousness. Someone here may catch a couplet of it, someone there a rhyme, Someone else a single image – just a skerrick at a time! All dispersed, that mighty ballad! You can glean it grain by grain From your workmates, from your comrades, from a stranger in the train; But it cannot be assembled, cannot reach its final stage, Till united we inscribe it on tomorrow’s virgin page.109 Like Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Manifold wrote many of his own ballads on the model of the anonymous traditional ballads; several appeared in books of his own verse, published between 1948 and 191, including two on Ned Kelly. Most of his other poetry is in tighter, more complex and ‘high-literary’ traditional forms (the sonnet, for example) and these reveal his remarkable technical proficiency, his command of older literatures in several languages, and an icy political passion that is one of the more exciting qualities of his verse. A taste of it can be found in his variation on the classical ‘aubade’, ‘No Rest for Lovers’:

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My darling, my beauty; the whistles have blown. Get you to your duty and I to my own. So soon day uncovers the struggle once more, There’s no rest for lovers who are angry and poor.110 And again, in the dedicatory verse to Kate – ‘Comrade Katharine’ – who had revealed to him ‘Love’s rare and perfect kind’: Not just the ornament Of leisure and content But sinewy and keen To walk in the cold and share The tang as if marine Of hatred in the air.111 (‘For Comrade Katharine’) That bracing Miltonic disdain appears again, several years later, in 191, in an attack on the contemporary vogue for confessional poetry, based on a poem by the French ‘Parnassian’ poet Leconte de Lisle, whose detached and classical verse Manifold admired. It is not clear which, if any, Australian poets he had in mind, but the savage negations tell us much about his sense of the proprieties of serious poetry. These are the last six lines: I can be proud and dumb, though I should go Uncrowned for ever to the dark below; My dreams and drunkenness are mine to keep. My life is not for whistles or salutes; On public platforms I decline to leap With bloody charlatans and prostitutes.112 (‘Contemporaries’) Manifold’s influence on the local literary scene was considerably greater than his fairly modest national reputation might suggest.11 Most Brisbane writers of the 1950s and 190s – and some in the 1970s and even the early 1980s – recall the trek to Wynnum North to take part in



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folk-singing, poetry reading, and animated political and literary discussion. They included contemporaries and political allies like David Forrest (David Denholm), author of the classic short novel of the New Guinea campaign The Last Blue Sea (1959), ideological opponents like Martin Haley, Thea Astley, whose short story ‘Journey to Olympus’ describes a visit to Wynnum in thinly-veiled fictional guise, and aspiring writers like Tom Shapcott and Rodney Hall. The surprising cultural authority of the ‘Old Left’ in Brisbane literary circles in the 1950s, with Manifold as its benevolent commissar, should not be underestimated – and it often has been. Apart from providing hospitality and mentoring, it sustained the Realist Writers Group and fuelled the early phase of Brisbane’s folk revival, and it was recognised and applauded in Melbourne by Overland, which published a special Queensland Centenary issue in July 1959, with stories, poetry, features and reviews about Queensland, mainly by Queenslanders (including, sadly, a piece on Steele Rudd by Vance Palmer, who died just before the issue went to press, and was therefore also the subject of an obituary by Stephen Murray-Smith). But it would also be a mistake to accord that authority undue weight or staying-power. Born amid the ideological hysteria of the early Cold War years, the ‘moment of Manifold’ did not survive the cooling of tensions and softening of attitudes in the early 190s. The rising mainstream in Australian literature was clearly the style and sensibility to be found above all in Patrick White’s novels (though also in Judith Wright’s poetry): a highly wrought sensuousness and suggestiveness in word and image, an intense self-consciousness, and a reverence for the personal ‘moment of vision’. It is these and kindred qualities that come through most strongly in the work of poets like Hall, Shapcott, Judith Rodriguez (Green) and David Malouf, all of whom turned twenty in the mid1950s, and continued on as dominant Brisbane voices into the 190s and 1970s. Judith Wright was persuaded by Val Vallis and Ken Hamilton, head of the English Department at the university, to descend from the Mount (Tamborine) to offer her famous weekly series of poetry classes at the university in the mid-190s. These, together with the publication in 19 of her selected volume Five Senses – probably her most popular book – lent her authority to a new lyrical idealism in poetry, an

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authority that was reinforced by the critical advocacy of Professor A. K. (Andy) Thomson, a prolific anthologist for Queensland schools and a coeditor, with Wright, of The Poet’s Pen (Jacaranda Press, 195). Rodney Hall (b. 195), however, remained a great admirer of Manifold and was the author of a fine book-length study of his life and work. His own poetry often conveys a tone comparable with Manifold’s icy disdain, transmuted into a kind of querulous self-assertion: From my new world I’m waving. See how far I’ve come? It’s no use being envious; Nothing but a life of heartbreak Can win you entry to this place.114 (‘Heaven, In a Way’) The particular tone adopted here (though ironised in this instance) was seriously characteristic of Hall’s poetry, as it was of a later disciple like Graham Rowlands, and is an important symptom of the subtle disabling of a public poetic stance like Manifold’s, and before him, in different ways, Baylebridge, Moynihan and Stephens, a stance that draws its authority from traditions that impute social efficacy to poetry. The best-known poets of the 190s and 1970s, it could be argued, had lost that faith, and the essential inwardness of their gaze – even their anger turns in on itself rather than out into the world – reflects their sense of the poet as being, for better or worse, no longer really connected to or heeded by the wider society. Thomas Shapcott represents this shift in its most engaging form. Born in Ipswich in 195, he lived there during his early adult life, and in 1975 made it the subject of his best-known volume of poetry, Shabbytown Calendar. He was a key presence, through his involvement with the university and its press, in the Brisbane literary scene from the mid1950s into the 190s and beyond. The rich sensuousness of the poetry written in his early twenties, its attentiveness to nuances of individual feeling, and his search for personal epiphanies, especially in nature, constitute a real break with the hard-edged classicism and robust balladry of Manifold, and perhaps even some continuities with the softer postromanticism of older poets like Picot and Devaney. A delightful sonnet



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like ‘The Finches’ owes something, at least, to a common precursor in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A tiny spill of bird-things in a swirl and crest and tide that splashed the garden’s edge, a chatterful of finches filled the hedge and came upon us with a rush and curl and scattering of wings. They were so small I laughed to see them ludicrously gay among the thorny stalks, and all that day they teased me with their tiny-throated call. They were a jest, a scampering of neat brisk sweets, they were all such frivolities I did not think to call them real, I was too merry with their flight to see the heat that angered their few days, to recognise my own stern hungers in their fragile cries.115 What Shapcott did share with Manifold – as he did with his exact contemporary and friend Rodney Hall – was a deep knowledge of music, and a keener interest than Manifold in ‘translating’ the formal complexities and tonal subtleties of the great composers – especially the great modern composers – into poetry. His most frequently anthologised poems include ‘fugues’, ‘motets’ and a sequence of ‘Piano Pieces’ addressed to Brahms, Webern, Schoenberg and others. Music, in its most elaborate and sophisticated forms, has been a constant presence in his poetry, a fact that is perhaps not inconsistent with a poetic retreat from public engagement. I listen in my room to all the world code into threnody and in my ears disparate litanies and rounds are spelled, and thought takes voice. All music fars and nears in me. White viols fill my room alive. Let even the least notes live and thrive.11 (‘Music at Night’)

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One way of linking literature to a collectivity is for the writer to focus on explicitly shared and identified local landscapes. But Brisbane itself, as a distinctive physical and social environment, does not figure prominently in the work of Hall or Shapcott. It figures much less, for example, than in the poetry and fiction of their sometime expatriate contemporary, David Malouf (b. 194), whose first novel, Johnno (1975), set in the postwar Brisbane of his childhood, has become the definitive Brisbane novel. Its ascendancy has been somewhat to the disadvantage of other, equally lively and evocative accounts, similarly formed out of nostalgic separation, such as Jack Lindsay’s autobiographical Life Rarely Tells (1958) and Thea Astley’s novel The Slow Natives (195), which depict life in Brisbane in, respectively, the years immediately following the First World War and the late 1950s. Another somewhat neglected evocation of Brisbane in this period, and one that predates both Astley and Malouf, is The Delinquents (192), a novel by ‘Criena Rohan’, the pen-name of Deirdre Cash (1928–2). Rohan was a Melbourne writer, the product of a working-class Irish Catholic background and of a tradition of critical social realism that is largely absent from ‘home-grown’ Brisbane writing in the postwar decades. Her primary interest – sympathetic without being sentimental – is in the experiences of the two teenage lovers from Bundaberg, Brownie and Lola, and the years of persecution and neglect they both suffer at the hands of their families and the state. But the novel is enlivened by the crisp authenticity of the dialogue and the lingering descriptions of Brisbane’s inner-suburban environments, especially an old Queenslander they share in West End – sacred turf to a later generation of Brisbane novelists – with its latticed verandahs, the rampant bougainvillea, the rose, blue and golden light falling on the hall floor through the front door glass, and the possums invading the kitchen.117 Some of Rohan’s other observations of Brisbane in the early 190s, registered through Lola’s shrewd intelligence, are less comfortable: the punitive welfare systems, the lack of sewerage, the blowflies, cockroaches and gastroenteritis, and the chronic housing shortage. If the home-grown generation of writers – mainly poets at this stage in their careers – that came of age in Brisbane in the 1950s seemed to move away from the publicly engaged stances of earlier generations, this



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was counterbalanced by the energy with which they threw themselves into ‘publicity’ at other points in the literary process, as editors, anthologists and promoters of Australian literature. Shapcott was a member, and later the director, of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Hall was for some years the chair of the Australia Council itself. But the authority of those positions was no greater than they each gained as editors, together or separately, of several key poetry anthologies in the late 190s and early 1970s: New Impulses in Australian Poetry (198), Australian Poetry Now (1970), Australian Poetry 1970 (1970) and Consolidation: The Second Paperback Poets Anthology (1981). The last of these, edited by Shapcott, followed the First Paperback Poets Anthology, edited seven years earlier by Roger McDonald, himself an accomplished younger poet and later novelist, and poetry editor for the University of Queensland Press (UQP). Both anthologies were selections from UQP’s First and Second Paperback Poets Series, each of which published several mainly single-authored volumes for some years (eighteen in four years for the first series, nineteen in six years for the second), including some poets with a Brisbane connection, such as Rhyll McMaster (The Brineshrimp, 1972), Judith Rodriguez, David Lake and Manfred Jurgensen, as well as books by Hall, McDonald and Shapcott themselves. This major innovation in Australian poetry publishing built upon a slightly earlier initiative, the Gargoyle Poets series, largely the brainchild of Martin Duwell, editor of Makar, a magazine of new writing associated with the English Department of the University of Queensland. Some sixteen Australian poets were published in the small-format Gargoyle series through the early 1970s, including local poets Graham Rowlands, Philip Neilsen, Stefanie Bennett and Peter Annand. Poetry publishing in Brisbane during the 1970s was dominated by the ‘new writing’ ethos, and while an older writer like David Rowbotham could continue to write and publish his own work through these years – quite outside the New Impulses/Paperback Poets/UQP axis – using the Brisbane section of the Federation of Australian Writers, or FAW (formerly the QAAA), and the Courier-Mail as his support base, there was not much interest in Queensland writing as itself an historical as well as a contemporary phenomenon.This was despite the very strong interest in Australian history that some of the older poets – Shapcott,

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Hall and McDonald – had begun to evince through their own work. Writers’ awareness of their own literary past had peaked, it would seem, with Hadgraft’s literary history of Queensland and Byrnes’s and Vallis’s Queensland Centenary Anthology (both 1959). But there were some exceptions to this: Maureen Freer’s anthology, Square Poets (1971) – so-called because of its origins in a collective reading in King George Square, but with the ‘not hip’ connotation no doubt also intended – included many older writers: England, Devaney, Christesen, Haley, Blight, Rowbotham, Nacy Cato, Bill Scott, Grano and Manifold; together with newcomers like Neilsen, Annand and Jennifer McCrae.118 Similarly, Greg McCart’s Recent Queensland Poetry (1975), its title notwithstanding, saw fit to include poems by Rowbotham,Wright, Scott, Manifold, Devaney, Blight and Haley as well as pieces by McDonald, McMaster, Annand, Neilsen and others of that youthful ilk.119

Conclusion If this extended account of Brisbane and its writers up to 1975 has focused somewhat more on poetry than on fiction, this is an effect, partly, of choosing as an intermittent theme of the survey the changing character of the writer’s conscious relation to Brisbane, a relation that tends to manifest itself more clearly in the more self-conscious medium of poetry. It is also true, however, that for whatever reasons Brisbane does seem to have produced over the years proportionally more poets than prose writers (especially novelists) when compared not only with the rest of Queensland, which can perhaps be accounted for partly in terms of the performance opportunities provided by a city milieu, but also with Sydney and Melbourne, at least, of the other state capitals. Here perhaps the economics of book-publishing can provide an explanation: the ‘branch office’ phenomenon has applied to publishing in Brisbane just as it has to other businesses, and local publishing, sensitive to the particularities of the writer’s environment, has developed late, with the cheaper forms of publication – slim volumes of poetry – appearing first. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, as will be seen in the next chapter, that situation has changed in spectacular fashion, and Brisbane fiction has also now come of age with a vengeance.

An Unlikely City: The Making of Literary Brisbane, 1975–2001 Todd Barr and Rodney Sullivan For much of the twentieth century, Brisbane writers had to cope with the ironic connotations – merited or not – of the notion of ‘Queensland literature’. It was a notion sometimes received like English surfing or Jamaican bobsledding, one given life not just by readers and critics but by Brisbane writers themselves. Provincial, conservative, oppressive, the city was a ‘barbarian place’ when it came to appreciating and supporting good writing. Isolated and mostly neglected, writers worth their salt escaped as soon as they could; and so long as they stayed, they readily adopted the archetypal literary personas of outsider and misfit.Thus, the historian Ross Fitzgerald observed that the pursuit of writing in Queensland until the 1990s was largely a ‘quixotic devotion’.1 Some local institutions, nevertheless, supported Brisbane’s ‘quixotic’ writers and literary devotees, among them the old Queensland State Library, whose building still stands in the city on the north side of the Brisbane River. The building itself now seems quixotic when compared with the new, ‘cutting-edge’ state library complex on the bank opposite. It is small and squat and decorated with a bright mosaic. In 1978 – and alluding to the ephemeral position of writing in conservative Brisbane – the poet Kevin Hart described it as bursting ‘green, red, gold’ but still ‘unnoticed’, with the nearby statue of Queen Victoria ‘calmly gazing into the past’.2 Life inside the old library, at least as described by David Malouf, was also quixotic. In his 1975 novel Johnno, the library is a ‘strange hermetic

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world’ whose inhabitants merit anthropological study. It is a refuge for hobos – ‘old men with watery red-rimmed eyes’ – and would-be writers, like the novel’s two protagonists, Johnno and Dante. For them, the library is a portal to the world beyond Brisbane, the world of romantic literary cities like London and Paris.3 These library vignettes dramatise the notion that worthy literature was to be found somewhere else, outside Brisbane. They are a representation of Malouf ’s own inspiration for the novel, which was the challenge of making a city as unlikely as Brisbane central to the theme and organisation of a sustained literary work. Johnno is the book that signposts the dramatic development of Brisbane writing during the late twentieth century. As an attempt to create a literary identity for Brisbane, it was not alone. The year 1975 also saw the publication of three other novels that included Brisbane among their major subjects: Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant, which examined the city’s foundation as a penal colony, Rodney Hall’s A Place among People, which depicted a section of that same society after some 150 years of conflict, expansion and evolution, and Robert Macklin’s The Queenslander, much of which is set in 1950s and 1960s Brisbane.4 The technique that Malouf honed in Johnno – that of a Brisbane rendered intimately through nostalgic remembering, local detail and personal experience – remained influential in successive literary depictions of the city. By the 1990s, Malouf ’s international stature complemented the growing confidence and abundance of Brisbane writing. Then, the city boasted of an emergent literary culture built upon greater institutional support, the vibrancy of the poetry scene, and the success of novelists like Mary-Rose MacColl,Venero Armanno, Nick Earls, Melissa Lucashenko and Andrew McGahan. So great was the change to the city’s literary culture that, while Johnno was affirmed often as Brisbane’s signature novel, much of the concern that had inspired it – whether Brisbane could sustain a literary identity – now appeared redundant.

A city to escape Brisbane is ‘the ugliest place in the world’, according to Malouf ’s titlecharacter Johnno, ‘too mediocre even to be a province of hell’. For Johnno’s friend Dante,

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Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely! I have taken to wandering about after school looking for one simple object in it that might be romantic, or appalling even, but there is nothing. It is still the most ordinary place in the world. Readers of Johnno view the city, from the 1940s to the 1960s, through the eyes of Dante, the novel’s narrator. On returning to Brisbane from England, Dante recalls his youthful friendship with Johnno, a rebellious, charming rogue. They meet first as boys on the beach at Scarborough, a suburb to the north of Brisbane. Later, they share secondary schooling at Brisbane Grammar School. A turbulent friendship develops and continues during their subsequent studies at the University of Queensland. The dynamics of their relationship unfold through their differing perceptions of Brisbane. Johnno is completely at odds with the city. As soon as he can he flees, first to the Congo and later to Europe. Dante is more ambivalent. At one point he fears he may be irretrievably compromised: ‘Have I been shaped in any way – fearful prospect! – by Brisbane?’ Elsewhere, despite himself, he admits to an affinity for the city: Between the tall city office blocks Queen Street was empty, its tramlines aglow . . . I had the feeling as I walked across deserted intersections, past empty parks with their tropical trees all spiked and sharp-edged in the early sunlight, that it might even be beautiful.5 Dante and Johnno embody Malouf ’s own interior debate about Brisbane, his flight from the city to Europe, and his return home in the 1960s to find the city he remembered already transformed and in the grip of developers. As Dante remarks, ‘It is a sobering thing, at just thirty, to have outlived the landmarks of your youth.’6 In Johnno, the Brisbane of Malouf ’s childhood and youth is preserved within the fictional aspic of Dante’s memories. This emotionally charged fragment of Brisbane is, perhaps, Johnno’s most enduring legacy. It is a measure also of Malouf ’s achievement that he self-consciously embarked on the task of creating a literary identity for his home city. Indeed, there was a pervasive sense among many young Queenslanders, at least until the 1970s, that real life could not begin until one landed in

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Europe. Johnno was Malouf ’s response.Writing in the preface to the 1998 commemorative edition, he observed that in some ways cities, even those of childhood, ‘only become real to us when they appear in books’: The cities we know from books, the London of Dickens, Balzac’s Paris, that are so real to our senses that we believe we could find our way in them, street by street, are cities of the imagination. They never existed anywhere but in the mind – first of the writer, then, because he put them there, in the mind of his readers. I wanted to do that, even with the most unlikely material (but such material, till it has been remade in the imagination, is always unlikely) for the city I had in mind, poor, shabby, unromantic Brisbane . . .7 The technique that Malouf used to shape his ‘unlikely material’ into a literary city was to render profound personal experience through the particularities of Brisbane life – its houses, smells, landscape and rituals – and thereby explore universal themes of friendship, love, growing up and death. Although in Johnno Malouf ’s Brisbane is ‘ordinary’ and ‘unromantic’, its shanty-town streets, weatherboard homes, rolling trams, and hot verandah nights shape the course of his characters’ lives and hold the imprint of their existence. Thus, Dante reflects upon the ‘fine roots’ that Brisbane: had put down in my emotions, so that a particular street corner would always be there for me in a meeting that had almost changed my life, or in a peculiar fact, half-sweet, half-sad, that it was from there a certain tram had left, the scene of sentimental adolescent partings.8 The apotheosis of this technique is the detailed description of the stump-high, wooden Queenslander house, first in Johnno and then most comprehensively in Malouf ’s 1985 memoir 12 Edmondstone Street. This memoir is a nostalgic meditation on the way that the minutiae of a physical location shape the people who live in it. As Malouf puts it, ‘First houses are the grounds of our first experience.’ In 12 Edmondstone Street, he imagines himself as an infant, crawling about at floor level, room by room, kitchen to verandah. He poses the question: ‘who is to say if

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our notions of space and dimension are not determined for all time by what we encounter there . . . ?’ The living, creaking wood of floors, the stump-high elevation above the ground, the verandah – openness to sky and sun are core reference points to a Brisbane child’s understanding of the world. Each room of the house, its objects and form, delineate social, private and secret norms – that ‘body of myths, beliefs, loyalties, anxieties, affections that shapes a life, and whose outline we enter and outgrow’. The bathroom, for instance, encloses the mysterious, awkward processes of grooming and ablution, and the verandah opens to tea and pikelets and afternoon visitors. Below the house, among the dirt and ‘forest’ of stumps, is the ‘underside of things’. It is a ‘dream space, dark, full of terrors that lurk behind tree-trunks in the thickest forest, hob-goblins, old gods, but full as well of the freedom and mystery of a time before houses’.9 The open, wooden, tin-roof Queenslander has been a fecund literary domain, not just for Malouf but for many Brisbane writers. Houses are a central symbol of Rodney Hall’s A Place among People. The novel’s title denotes a major turning point in the life of its reclusive protagonist, Collocott, a refugee from his Melbourne family, who, when he buys a home on Brisbane’s bayside, is reluctantly drawn into the life of the local community. But his reclusive instincts remain and he is always prepared to retreat ‘up the eight steps to his verandah and inside’. He awkwardly attempts to negotiate his entry into other houses, including that of fisherman Chick Charlton, whose wife detests him as an intruder, and Mrs Pascoe’s place, a casual brothel, whose purpose Collocott fails to recognise. Finding unexpected reserves of courage, he offers the shelter of his own house to Daisy Daisy, an Aboriginal woman threatened by a racist mob. The novel offers a sometimes unflattering portrait of 1950s social, racial and religious dynamics on the fringe of Brisbane.10 For Malouf, in particular, the literary significance of the classic Queenslander house is not simply that it is a space to reveal personal truths among the minutiae of Brisbane life. It lies also in his ambition to create a literary identity for a city that he perceived to be ordinary and unlikely. For insofar as Brisbane was ‘ordinary’, it was not so in any real literary sense; this was a subjective judgment. Brisbane was ‘ordinary’ and ‘unromantic’ for Malouf because, for a young man growing up, nothing of interest, fashion or importance ever happened there. Thus,

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in Johnno the narrator Dante recalls that the arrival of General Douglas MacArthur and American troops during the Second World War was the only occasion on which Brisbane had appeared in newsreels.11 This is why it was not parliament or city hall but the pub, the brothel, the boxing ring and most importantly the Queenslander – that particular Brisbane home – that appealed to Malouf ’s literary sensibility. What was happening in Brisbane was ‘ordinary’, but what was happening inside Brisbane homes and in people’s lives was not: their tastes, rituals, relationships, hopes and defeats.

A city to remember Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the concerns that motivated Malouf ’s depiction of Brisbane continued to engage the city’s writers: that Brisbane was provincial and conservative, a city to escape from, a place of liking or loathing, all remained important themes and issues for exploration. In addition, Malouf ’s literary model for Brisbane was matched by similar efforts. There were many variations of a Brisbane realised through personal remembering and local architecture. In her 1978 novel Tirra Lirra by the River, Jessica Anderson depicts 1920s Brisbane as a ‘backward and unworldly place’. Elsewhere, she criticises the city she grew up in as ‘a place where artists, although they were known to exist, were supposed to exist elsewhere’. Thea Astley, in Reaching Tin River (1990), describes Brisbane as ‘a very boring town on its interrogatory river miles from the sea with its grilling summers, its undramatic winters’. According to Anne-Louise, the protagonist of Susan Johnson’s Hungry Ghosts (1996), life in Brisbane’s ‘comatose suburbs’ was ‘a half cooked thing, clumsy, insubstantial’. Helen, a Melbourne visitor to Brisbane in Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992), blurts out, ‘There’s nothing happening. There’s no one on the streets. How do you stand it?’12 In his 1978 anthology The Departure, Kevin Hart displays the propensity among Brisbane writers to both despise and eulogise their city. In the poem ‘Homages’, he calls Brisbane a ‘five out of ten attempt at a big city’; but in ‘For Brisbane’, he writes that ‘nothing is so beautiful as Brisbane at night’, where ‘back streets open like hands’, and ‘where a girl strolls past a fashion window and wonders what if these are my best years now?’ Contradictory reactions also appear in Janette Turner Hospital’s

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short story ‘The Ocean of Brisbane’. Brian and Philippa are childhood friends who, after returning to Brisbane in their adulthood, meet again at the Regatta Hotel. Relaxing on the verandah, looking at the sweep of the nearby river, Philippa falls in love with her home city but Brian hates it. ‘Everything’s stuck in a bloody time-warp . . . it’s like a swamp that sucks everything under . . .’13 Ipswich-born Thomas Shapcott’s 1984 prose-poem, White Stag of Exile, is a beautiful, lyrical variation on the theme of Brisbane as a place of artistic destitution and exile. Combining narrative, poetry and official records, Shapcott constructs an imaginative retelling of the life of Charles (Karoly) Pulszky and his lonely, tragic death in colonial Queensland. Pulszky was the first director of the National Gallery in Budapest. He was at the centre of Hungarian artistic and social life, but fell victim to politically inspired investigations. After a sensational trial for embezzlement, he migrated to Australia, arriving in 1888. A year later, Pulszky’s body was discovered behind a log, with a bullet through the heart, close to the Myrtletown Hotel. He had shot himself. After a brief inquest into the death of this little-known insurance salesman, he was buried in Brisbane’s Toowong cemetery. Shapcott was inspired to write about Pulszky’s life after coming across a small newspaper article that featured a ‘little tumbledown tombstone’ in the Toowong Cemetery under the heading ‘Do You Know This Spot?’14 Also present in many of Brisbane’s literary voices, like that of Johnno’s narrator Dante, is a lingering, or final, claim of the city on their loyalties. Sometimes it is couched in the captivating smell and colour of the city’s vegetation. The work of Rodney Hall, Jessica Anderson and Janette Turner Hospital shares an intense concern with Brisbane’s distinctive subtropical terrain and vegetation. In the nostalgic short stories ‘After Long Absence’ and ‘Litany for the Homeland’, Janette Turner Hospital recalls her Brisbane garden as a young girl’s sanctuary. For Turner Hospital, Brisbane is the smell of rainforest and frangipani trees, a place where solace is found in the mango tree outside the kitchen window. Elsewhere, Angelika Fremd’s 1992 novel, The Glass Inferno, concludes with its heroine Inge sensing renewed hope amid ‘the flickering mauve light’ of the jacarandas along Coronation Drive. Mary-Rose MacColl also gives lush affirmation to Brisbane in her 1999 novel, Angels in the Architecture:

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Brisbane in late spring is a warm fecund place ideal for love. The days are long and sleek and summer’s a hot promise. Dark figs turn froggreen, jacarandas lilac, bauhinias blush pink, and poinsettias shock red. Magpies, butcher birds and rainbow lorikeets streak the sky. The air buzzes. The earth creaks and moves. Angels sigh.15 The claim of Brisbane on its writers is most evident throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the prevalence of autobiography and autobiographically inspired fiction. Alongside 12 Edmondstone Street, Brisbane’s outstanding memoirs include Hugh Lunn’s Over the Top with Jim (1989) and Tony Maniaty’s All Over the Shop (1993). Over the Top with Jim, an account of Lunn’s boyhood in suburban Annerley, was serialised on the ABC and has sold more copies than any other Australian childhood memoir. Maniaty’s memoir records, with considerable good humour, the travails of a Greek-Australian family negotiating Brisbane society and small retail businesses in the 1950s.16 Also noteworthy is Blessed City, Alison Hoddinott’s 1990 collection of Gwen Harwood’s wartime letters to her close friend Thomas Riddell. It is a whimsical, loving window into the poet’s Brisbane youth of the 1930s and 1940s. Barbara Blackman’s autobiography, Glass after Glass (1997), recalls artistic and literary movements in Brisbane. It offers, in particular, an insider’s perspective on the activities of the Barjai literary group during the late 1940s.17 ‘Autobiographical fiction’, a phrase used by Jessica Anderson to explain her own work, applies easily not only to Tirra Lirra by the River and Johnno but also to Malouf ’s 1984 novel, Harland’s Half Acre, and to Anderson’s 1987 anthology, Stories from the Warm Zone (1987). Autobiographical content, to a greater or lesser degree, permeates much of the city’s best fiction from this period. Other novels in this category include: Donald Hutley’s The Swan (1978), Gerard Lee’s True Love and How to Get It (1981), Judith Arthy’s Goodbye Goldilocks (1984), Thomas Shapcott’s Hotel Bellevue (1986), Susan Johnson’s Messages from Chaos (1987), Manfred Jurgensen’s A Difficult Love (1987), Matthew Condon’s The Motor Cycle Café (1988), Janette Turner Hospital’s Charades (1988) and The Last Magician, Faith Richmond’s Remembrance (1988), Jay Verney’s A Mortality Tale (1991), Angelika Fremd’s The Glass Inferno (1992), Andrew McGahan’s

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Praise (1992), Rosie Scott’s Lives on Fire (1993),Venero Armanno’s Romeo of the Underworld (1994), John Birmingham’s He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (1994), Estelle Runcie Pinney’s Time Out for Living (1995), Nick Earls’s Zigzag Street (1997), Mary-Rose MacColl’s Angels in the Architecture (1999) and Chris Nyst’s Cop This! (1999).18 In much of this writing, the Queenslander-style home remained a key personal space and unifying literary motif. Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River opens with Norah Porteous’s frisson of recognition as she returns to the high-set Brisbane home of her childhood and adolescence. She looks at its distinctive front steps, ‘fourteen planks spanning air, like a broad ladder propped against the verandah’. They lead her into the old house and the memories that still inhabit it. A somewhat similar house, overlooking the Brisbane River and the University of Queensland, provides an idyllic opening location for Gerard Lee’s True Love and How to Get It. In Matthew Condon’s Motorcycle Café, the narrator’s grandmother lives in an ancient, raised house in Rosalie. Rusted railway tracks, ‘pulled from the earth of forgotten country lines’, were used to set the house on its stumps. They groan and creak in the night, and as she rests in bed the grandmother thinks that the ‘rumble of years of travel and passengers had been passed into the tracks’.19 Other writers also, like Malouf in 12 Edmondstone Street, have explored the dark spaces underneath Queensland homes. Having fled a broken personal life in Melbourne, Boyd Kennedy savours the secret refuge underneath his grandmother’s house in Shapcott’s Hotel Bellevue. In Fremd’s The Glass Inferno, the underside of the house has both gothic and domestic aspects. It is ‘a mysterious hollowed damp’ where Inge Heinrich goes to mourn her abandoned children.Venero Armanno opens his 1999 novel Firehead at a house on the corner of Merthyr Road and Abbott Street, amid an urban forest in New Farm. It is the home of narrator Salvatore Capistrano. For the adolescent Salvatore, the dirty ‘cobwebby underworld’ of rusty broken soldiers and one-eyed teddy bears is like a scene from the Italian Day of the Dead. It is also a secret place, where he barters sexual favours with near-neighbour Gabriella.20 After producing his 1994 collection of apocryphal share-house stories – He Died with a Felafel in His Hand – John Birmingham was struck, on subsequently reading 12 Edmondstone Street, by how closely that

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book anticipated his own settings and themes. In particular, Birmingham was impressed by Malouf ’s depiction of verandah-living: where visitors sit on white cane chairs among potted ferns eating pikelets and scones. It paralleled his own conception of life on Brisbane verandahs, except that bucket bongs and Tim-Tams superseded the pikelets and scones. For Birmingham, Malouf ’s 12 Edmondstone Street is the literary ancestor of He Died with a Felafel in His Hand.21 The poetry of Gwen Harwood often returned to her childhood home in Grimes Street, Auchenflower. Purchased in 1927 for £1,000, ‘Boronia’ boasted ten rooms, verandahs on three sides, and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ front steps (descending to a landing then dividing). Harwood’s life there is evoked in such poems as ‘The Blue Pagoda’, ‘Divertimento: II Affetuoso [sic]’, ‘Night and Dreams’ and ‘Return of the Native’. Like 12 Edmondstone Street, these poems traverse the personal, social and natural worlds of a Brisbane house: dances on the verandah, fearful shadows at night, mango, poinsettia and camphor, her father boiling a mudcrab, silly stories in the treehouse, City Hall unrivalled on a low skyline, and in the late afternoon cumulus gathering over the city. Once, when recalling her walks home from school through the streets of Auchenflower, Harwood observed that ‘little’ did she know that there was ‘enough life’ for a ‘great novel’ in every house she passed. It is a sentiment that inspired the making of Brisbane fiction from Johnno and Tirra Lirra by the River, through to the Motorcyle Café, Nick Earls’s Zigzag Street and John Birmingham’s The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco (1997).22 For Birmingham, the lifestyles experienced in Brisbane’s creaking, open-spaced, wooden homes generate the most eccentric, adventurous and iconic city stories. The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco echoes Malouf ’s and Harwood’s nostalgia for Brisbane’s older, high-set houses, many of which were being demolished by developers. In ‘Return of the Native’, for instance, Harwood tells of visiting Grimes Street in her middle age to find ‘Boronia’ converted into flats and the suburb ‘trendy with fancy brick’. As Birmingham himself writes, ‘The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco was a hymn to, or maybe a requiem for, the life lived in those slumping old homesteads with their rambling corridors and often chaotic floor plans.’23

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A city to accuse While many literary creations of Brisbane arose from the personal realm of fictionalised remembrance and autobiography, other literary voices spoke more directly about contemporary Brisbane society and its politics. Not that the two realms were exclusive. Indeed, for writers in 1970s and 1980s Brisbane, political corruption, social repression and legalised absurdities were often personal experiences. The civic vandalism and corruption among elements of the BjelkePetersen government (1968–87), and the continuing loss of old Brisbane houses and iconic venues to development, elicited a literature of protest, underpinned by personal nostalgia. Its landmark novels include Shapcott’s Hotel Bellevue, an angry literary retort to the demolition of Brisbane’s historic Bellevue Hotel in 1979.The famous Cloudland Ballroom at Bowen Hills, torn down in 1982, was remembered in Matthew Condon’s Motorcycle Café, Susan Johnson’s Hungry Ghosts and Venero Armanno’s Romeo of the Underworld and The Volcano, and by several poets such as Robert Morris and Ross Clark. Michael Sariban’s poem ‘Softlights and Bulldozers’ laments the loss of the Bellevue Hotel and the desecration of historic city buildings like the Treasury building and the Lands Office, newly ‘lit in gaudy pink, green, purple’. In 1980s Brisbane, the ‘past’ is ‘selectively preserved and bathed in commercial colours’.24 The conservative, sexually prudish values of the Bjelke-Petersen era are satirised in Thomas Shapcott’s poem ‘The Joyner Act: A Queensland Text’. A leading coalition MP is hauled to police headquarters with a ‘cache of subversive books’. He receives a pardon, subject to the ‘public burning of his books’. Gerard Lee’s novel True Love and How to Get It contains an absurdist critique of Brisbane’s moral conservatism. Throughout the book the blinking, red television towers atop Mt Cootha – standing like large aroused penises – haunt the novel’s sexually frustrated hero, Tom. In the throes of desire, Tom goes to the old state library – David Malouf ’s ‘strange hermetic world’ – and obsessively searches through magazines for glamour shots of his ex-model love-interest, Christine. He is chased from the library by a female librarian, who follows him out into the street and across Queens Park, apprehending him in a vice-like testicle grip in front of the venerable statue of Queen Victoria.25

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In his 1983 anthology The Skin Trade, Manfred Jurgensen finds political solace in the city’s natural beauty, a variation of the frequent depiction of Brisbane landscapes as sources of personal solace. The poem ‘Jacaranda’ is set in the aftermath of electoral defeat.Throughout the city, jacaranda trees are shedding their blossoms, and ‘violet votes outnumbered everywhere still cast their doubt along each street . . . lilac hope surrounds the polling booths with fragile beauty . . . nature was magnificent in defeat’.26 A less lyrical perspective on the city and its institutions – especially its universities – is adopted in Ross Fitzgerald’s series of broad satirical novels and short stories in the late 1980s featuring Grafton Everest, a lively local variant of the amoral academic and sexual opportunist made popular in Britain in the novels of Kingsley Amis, David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. In Soaring (1994), however, Fitzgerald’s most ambitious and serious novel, Brisbane’s social and political landscape provides more of a backdrop to the perennial themes of lust, fidelity and transcendence, explored through a triptych of internal monologues which are ‘recorded’ for posterity, and mythologically framed by Ovid’s violent tale of Tereus, Procne and Philomela. The recording characters – Rodney, a countercultural journalist; his illegitimate daughter Rebekah, a recovering alcoholic; and Michael, a radical Irish-Australian priest – are convincingly imagined, and their monologues – rambling and repetitive, but engaging and funny – show Fitzgerald’s talent for interweaving private confession and public satire.27 Several other writers have explored discrimination and social inequality within Brisbane settings. Brett Dionysius’s poem ‘Kangaroo Point Field, 1830’ mourns the destruction of Indigenous cultures in Brisbane. Sam Wagan Watson, in ‘last exit to Brisbane . . .’, links present-day experiences of exclusion to the ‘forged black scratch’ of Brisbane’s racist past. In her 1999 novel Hard Yards, Melissa Lucashenko details Brisbane’s social divisions: the city is a place where ‘city stiffs’ in six-thousand-dollar clothes ignore the ‘parkies’ gathered in King George Square, and where the ‘parkies’ of King George Square regard ‘city stiffs’ only as ‘walking wallets’.28 The Bjelke-Petersen era is pivotal to the notion of Queensland as a ‘cultural wasteland’ from which escape was the preferred choice. In the 1970s and 1980s many writers adopted an oppositional stance to the .

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culturally repressive Bjelke-Petersen government, and some chose exile. Nick Earls remembers Queensland in the 1980s as ‘a place the writers had left’. Thomas Shapcott, himself an ‘escapee’, believes that Queensland’s residual ‘convict/overseer’ mentality drove many of its gifted artists interstate or overseas. Other literary escapees include Jessica Anderson, Thea Astley, Rodney Hall, Janette Turner Hospital, Susan Johnson, Gerard Lee, David Malouf and Judith Wright. Considering such departures, Nigel Krauth asserted that most relationships between the Sunshine State and its writers end in ‘a complicated divorce’. His own case, though, points to the possibility of re-marriage: Krauth came to Queensland from New South Wales in the late 1970s, wrote his first novel, Matilda, My Darling, left, but subsequently returned to become a prominent member of Brisbane’s literary community.29 Moreover, many of the writers who ‘left’, including David Malouf and Janette Turner Hospital, maintained an intimate connection with their home state. There is strong support, whether writers left or stayed, for Robyn Sheahan-Bright and Stuart Glover’s ‘counter-case for an intact writing and artistic culture in Queensland throughout the postwar period’. The writing community from the mid-1970s through the 1980s was maintained by an evolving core of Brisbane-based literary figures such as John Blight, Ross Clark, Maureen Freer, Hugh Lunn, John Manifold, Craig Munro, Philip Neilsen, Estelle Pinney and David Rowbotham. They ran Warana Writers Week and the Queensland Branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. They had access to the University of Queensland Press, one of the nation’s most progressive publishers of new fiction. Established literary figures nurtured emerging talent. David Malouf acknowledges the encouragement he received from David Rowbotham at a crucial early stage of his writing career. Thomas Shapcott generously welcomed the appearance of Gerard Lee’s True Love and How to Get It, pinpointing the young author’s triumph: ‘the teeming reality of his image of Brisbane, the telling details, the absolutely right moments’.30 In 2000, Andrew McGahan’s Last Drinks looked back to the BjelkePetersen era, which ended in the wake of the Fitzgerald Inquiry’s exposure of widespread police and political corruption.The novel closed the twentieth century with a superb literary exhumation of the pathology

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of a corrupt and powerful network exploiting 1980s Brisbane. Indeed, it is a work that offers a formidable challenge to other writers tempted to mine the same rich field. As Stuart Cunningham and Stuart Glover noted, ‘Last Drinks is the emblematic attempt to deal with the “old Brisbane”.’31

A city to acclaim The image of Brisbane writers changed between 1975 and 2000. The 1970s and 1980s stereotype of the misfit and exile was replaced by the creative industries celebrity. Brisbane in the 1990s not only celebrated its authors but also produced more of them. A large cohort of successful authors emerged in the 1990s and these authors were embraced by their city more than their predecessors were and seem, in the main, untouched by any impulse to flee. Nick Earls’s novels, particularly the bestselling, internationally published Zigzag Street, earned him such popular esteem that he became his city’s ‘celebrity author’.32 The 1990s were truly, as Stuart Glover claims, ‘the bountiful decade’, a verdict supported nationally by Delys Bird, who, in a year 2000 analysis of developments in Australian fiction, observed that ‘Queensland figures strongly in contemporary writing’. A short list of city writers who emerged in the decade includes Venero Armanno, Janice Bostok, John Birmingham, Emma Darcy, Brett Dionysius, Nick Earls, Rebecca Edwards, Paul Hardacre, Rowena Cory Linquist, Melissa Lucashenko, Mary-Rose MacColl, James Maloney, Andrew McGahan, Samuel Wagan Watson, Herb Wharton and Kim Wilkins.33 Brisbane writers also harvested an unprecedented spate of literary prizes, including two Australian/Vogel awards and four Miles Franklin awards. Andrew McGahan’s Praise won the Vogel in 1991 and also the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the best first book in the Pacific region. In 1995 Brisbane writers dominated the Miles Franklin Literary Award, ‘quashing any lingering perceptions of Brisbane as a literary backwater’. The winner was Helen Demidenko, with her novel The Hand that Signed the Paper, about atrocities in 1940s Ukraine. Jay Verney’s A Mortality Tale was on the short list. It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the order of the two novels was not reversed, as Demidenko was controversially unmasked as plain Helen Darville, devoid of the Ukrainian ancestors who hitherto had lent her fiction a spurious authenticity.

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Moreover, the novel came under fierce attack from critics, moral as well as literary, for alleged anti-Semitism and a dubious use of sources. In the ‘Demidenko affair’, Brisbane hosted Australia’s liveliest literary scandal since the Ern Malley hoax of the mid-1940s. The notoriety, however, could not diminish the standing of the city’s other writers, including the pre-1990s veterans. In 1996 David Malouf ’s Remembering Babylon won the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest prize for literature, stranding John Banville and V. S. Naipaul on the short list. Thea Astley closed the decade in 2000 by winning her fourth Miles Franklin Award, for Drylands.34 Throughout the 1990s, Brisbane writing also led national literary experimentation in diverse areas, ranging from speculative fiction to electronic writing and publishing. In June 2000, operating from West End, Paul Hardacre and Brett Dionysius launched the electronic publishing venture PaperTiger Media. Offering an alternative outlet to traditional print for poetic expression, the venture was the first of its kind in Australia, producing an annual CD-ROM poetry anthology that combined print, audio and video formats.35 The 1990s generation of writers had the support of a comparatively munificent literary infrastructure, at least compared with the Spartan provisions available to their predecessors. This reflected the state’s growing prosperity. Throughout the decade, a global resources boom drove minerals- and energy-rich Queensland. Greater Brisbane, with a population of over two million in 2000, became one of the fastest growing conurbations in the developed world. The election of the Goss Labor government in 1989 ushered in radical cultural policy development, with writing a particular beneficiary. The new direction was embodied in the seminal 1991 Queensland: A State for the Arts report, which took as a given ‘that culture must at first be locally created and nurtured. From there it becomes nationally and internationally appreciated’. The Queensland government, and to some extent the Brisbane City Council, increasingly accepted the value of a vigorous writing culture. Of particular importance was state funding for individual writers: beneficiaries included Gary Crew, Venero Armanno and Nick Earls. The Queensland Writers Centre (QWC), one of the most successful in Australia, opened in 1990 with funding from the Australia Council and minor sponsorship from the

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Queensland government. In the next ten years Australia Council annual funding for QWC remained static at approximately $40,000, while the Queensland government’s annual contribution grew from $25,000 to $260,000. The QWC energised Brisbane’s literary culture and nurtured the new generation of outstanding writers. Other elements of Brisbane’s writing infrastructure included the Brisbane Writers Festival, the University of Queensland Press and the Queensland Poetry Festival. In 2000 the Beattie government spent close to $1 million on writing, including the Premier’s Literary Awards, with prizes amounting to $150,000.36 Brisbane no longer seemed so unlikely a literary city. In the first instance, it had ceased to be a hostile place for literary enterprise and appreciation. Nor was it small and provincial. In Andrew McGahan’s Last Drinks, the ex-alcoholic journalist and narrator, George, returns to the post-Fitzgerald Brisbane of the 1990s. He compares unfavourably his own shabby condition with Brisbane’s recent development. Driving through the centre of town, he sees shopping strips blooming with cafes. ‘Customers in loose summer clothes’ lounge about ‘sipping coffee in all shapes and sizes and, for that matter, all sorts of wine and beer.’ There are new, grander apartment blocks and at ‘their feet a whole new esplanade of restaurants and bars’. Struggling to comprehend the scene, George sweats in his car, ‘somehow disturbed by it all’.37 Development and population growth stimulated new literary identities for Brisbane, highlighting civic subcultures and divisions between outer suburb and inner city. In Melissa Lucashenko’s 1997 novel, Steam Pigs, the kids from Eagleby ‘go optimistically’ to the city to make their millions, although when they get there they face ‘money dressed in cool blond arrogance’. They don’t know that ‘you can’t buy wealth with hard work . . . It’s bred on town ridges that look to the mountains’.38 Insofar as it ever was an ‘unlikely’ city, the greater challenge now appeared to be not whether Brisbane could sustain literary identities but what perspectives and themes such identities could and should represent. For writers like Nick Earls and Venero Armanno, Brisbane could be eulogised, criticised and mocked without calling into question the city’s literary worth. In Zigzag Street, Brisbane is identified as the ‘Whipper Snipper capital of the world’. But it is also beautiful: the sun setting, a ‘blue haze’ settling ‘over the brewery and Toowong’, and ‘crazy streets

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like Zigzag Street, made up of curious angles and unexplained decisions, streets that lose themselves in the contours’. In his 1995 short story ‘Where Bread Is Sweet’, Venero Armanno conceives an ironic rejoinder to Malouf ’s Johnno and Dante, who sat in the old state library reading books about Paris and London and other places far more fulfilling than Brisbane. Armanno’s ‘Brisbane boy’ is a character that likes the heat and the sweat, ‘open car windows’ and the ‘scents of flowers in full bloom’. He doesn’t read books but watches television ‘bare-chested, barefoot, tousle-haired, wearing only boxer shorts’. He has ‘never wanted to go anywhere in the world’ and that is his strength in life.39

Conclusion If one work could be said to synthesise the literary conceits of Brisbane writers during the last quarter of the twentieth century – provinciality, nostalgia, repression, exile, development, growth and loss – then it would be Andrew McGahan’s Last Drinks. Its narrator, the compromised George, returns from self-exile in a small town near the New South Wales border to trawl over the dregs of Bjelke-Petersen Queensland, while around him, drunk with choice and prosperity, Brisbane basks in the sunshine of its growth. Last Drinks, at first, is a politically inspired book. Queensland’s unique brand of corruption and repression is approached through a cast of disreputable characters, like ex-Minister Marvin McNulty: ‘a state with sound and sensible government would hardly have attracted men like Marvin. Not if decision making was reasoned, policy cautious, and accountability a prime concern.’40 Here, unlike the Brisbane of David Malouf ’s Johnno, what happens in parliament and city hall is important, along with life inside pubs, brothels and houses. Last Drinks is also deeply nostalgic. In this sense it echoes Johnno, evoking the literary motif of the Queenslander home and its personal significances: Nothing had changed at all. The yard was shaded by the same ancient Moreton Bay figs . . . The house was there, too, over a century old . . . Beyond it the ground dropped away to a gully, all wild with weeds and vines . . . this was the house, unaltered, where, at the

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age of thirty, I’d finally fallen in love. And the memory of May was everywhere. Moreover, George is a literary descendant of Johnno’s Dante, another incarnation of the ‘return of the native’: the departed or exiled narrator whose observations and memories of Brisbane, provoked upon coming home, mould the substance of the city’s identity; and its charm and its lack, its sense of self, experienced first-hand but moderated by the knowledge of other places and other ways of living. As it was for Dante, so it is for George. The Brisbane of his time has passed and survives only in memory. But the irony of George’s ‘Brisbane-lost’ is that it exemplifies most of the traits that, for many writers, made the city so unlikely a literary terrain – repression, backwardness, boredom and corruption: . . . it was the new inhabitants that disturbed me most, the new generation. So young, so confident. Late lunchers and afternoon coffee drinkers idled at the tables of the cafes and watched me go by, safe in their shade . . . It was a world that had replaced my kind.There was no reason to hate people for being young and bright, but I did. I wanted my world back.Where things moved in secrecy and back rooms, where there was no glamour, no grace, and only a sweaty drunken rush, and only for the few.41 By employing an unreliable ‘native’ like George, McGahan makes possible several different identities for Brisbane. He both affirms and critiques Brisbane’s new-found confidence and proclaimed cultural renaissance: . . . even at a glance it was clear that Brisbane had blossomed without me . . . It had become what a city should be, what Brisbane should always have been . . . Everything was out in the open. All the things that had been kept unlawful, except for the privileged few, seemed to be anyone’s now. And people had swarmed out of their houses and embraced it all . . . It had been my home, but I had no part in what it was now . . . I belonged to the bad old days. A decade or so earlier I’d walked these streets as if I owned Brisbane. It might have been ugly and drab on the outside, but it was mine, I was on the inside, and I

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knew where the true heart of it lay. Now . . . now the only thing ugly and drab was me, and I knew nothing.42 While Brisbane recreated, and its unique, Queensland character rendered, are core unifying themes of Last Drinks, it is a novel ultimately that asserts the essential subjectivity of Brisbane’s literary identity. It is the city of many Dantes and Georges, all of whose grasp on it is weakening even as they commit themselves to writing it down. For this very reason, Brisbane continues to exist more as a city of words than a physical landscape.

Natural Imaginings: The Literature of the Hinterland Belinda McKay South-East Queensland – the region encompassed by Coolangatta and the McPherson Range to the south, Cooloola and the Blackall Range to the north, and the Great Dividing Range to the west – represents one of Queensland’s most significant literary landscapes. As a crossover zone between temperate and tropical climatic zones, it has a particularly rich and varied flora and fauna. Geographically, too, it is very diverse. For millennia, this area defined by mountains and waterways contained important gathering places for ceremonies and trade, and its inhabitants elaborated the meaning of the landscape in a rich complex of stories and other cultural practices such as the bunya festivals. Colonisation disrupted but did not obliterate these cultural associations, which remain alive in the oral traditions of local Aboriginal people and, in more recent times, have surfaced in the work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her literary successors. European interest in the Moreton Bay region developed slowly. A penal colony was established in 1824, but the area was not opened to free settlement until 1842. The separation of Queensland from New South Wales in 1859 accelerated the growth of two towns: Brisbane – the region’s only viable port as well as the capital of the colony – and, to a lesser extent, the river town of Ipswich a few miles inland. Economically, South-East Queensland developed into a classic example of a port and administrative centre servicing a large, sparsely populated hinterland. Imaginatively, too,

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the south-eastern corner of the colony came to be represented in literature as a region of cultural contrasts, in which the urban life of Brisbane was juxtaposed against the natural or rural character of the surrounding region, which was often characterised as a hinterland in the figurative sense of a relatively unexplored and mysterious territory. Janette Turner Hospital vividly captures this sense of difference when she refers in The Last Magician (1992) to ‘that indistinct and provisional line where the city of Greater Brisbane could perhaps be said to end, and primordial time could be said to begin’.1 This contrapuntal representation of South-East Queensland was first elaborated in a number of novels by Rosa Praed, where the main characters commute between the political, administrative and commercial hub of the colonial capital and an area identifiable as the Logan valley, which is the site for rural enterprises such as farming and grazing and the site for recreation and restoration through expeditions to sublime and potentially dangerous natural environments. Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, a similar literary representation of South-East Queensland’s coastal areas as sites for colonial enterprises such as logging and fishing, as well as for restoration and recreation, developed only in the twentieth century. Today, however, the sharp literary contrast between urban and natural environments in South-East Queensland is disappearing as the hinterland’s relationship with Brisbane undergoes a radical transformation. From the 1950s onwards, the expansion of Brisbane and the urbanisation of the Gold Coast have increasingly blurred the old distinctions: Melissa Lucashenko’s Brisbane straggles into Logan City, and Matthew Condon’s Gold Coast is all artifice built on shifting sands. In the early twentyfirst century, conurbation is obliterating the natural environment and generating a vast suburbia that already stretches from Coolangatta to Noosa, and is now spreading up the river valleys of the Scenic Rim. The economies of the Gold and Sunshine coasts are no longer dependent on Brisbane, and new forms of transport allow people and goods to bypass the capital city. At the same time, the longstanding literary dichotomy of ‘urban’ Brisbane and the ‘natural’ or ‘rural’ landscapes of its surrounds is transmuting along with the landscape and economy of South-East Queensland. This chapter explores the shifting literary representations over the past 150 years of Brisbane’s hinterland.

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Shaping a literary landscape The earliest writings about South-East Queensland are the journals, reports and letters of explorers such as Matthew Flinders, John Oxley, Allan Cunningham and Ludwig Leichhardt.2 Later, the diaries and letters of early colonists recorded white understandings of the land and of contact with Aboriginal people: Tom Petrie’s reminiscences, recorded by his daughter Constance Campbell Petrie and published in 1904, have provided a particularly rich source for both historians and literary writers. Petrie recalled the role of the triennial bunya festivals in bringing together Aboriginal people from different areas, and emphasised the importance of storytelling at these events: Tales were told of what forefathers did, how wonderful some of them were in hunting and killing game, also in fighting.The blacks have lively imaginations of what happened years ago, and some of the incidents they remembered of their big fights, etc., were truly marvellous!3 After Petrie, stories about Aboriginal relationships with the land, and creation legends, are recorded by a number of white writers in the context of deepening their own (and their readers’) sense of place. Enid Bell published Aboriginal stories about the ‘mountain peaks of the great blue range above the [Logan] valley’ in Legends of the Coochin Valley (1946), and in his reminiscences of Moreton Bay – a significant source for Vance and Nettie Palmer – Thomas Welsby includes a good deal of Aboriginal material.4 Concerns about cultural appropriation began to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century: in 1951 Judith Wright declined to edit a collection of Aboriginal legends for Oxford University Press, refusing to turn them into ‘European yarns to amuse the kids’.5 It was not until the publication in 1972 of Stradbroke Dreamtime by Kath Walker (later known as Oodgeroo Noonuccal) that the history and legends of South-East Queensland came to be written from an Aboriginal perspective.6 Curiously, despite such abundant evidence from early colonial times of Aboriginal stories, some colonial writers insisted that their adopted land needed to be awakened by a white bard. Mary ‘Eva’ O’Doherty, in her poem ‘Queensland’, represents the colony as ‘barren’, ‘blank’ and

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‘lifeless’, awaiting ‘that touch informing’ of a nationalist poet. This idea was expressed as late as 1905 by F. Corkling, who writes in Steele Rudd’s Magazine: ‘For untold centuries the land embraced by this vast circle [Moreton Bay] slept like the sleeping beauty . . . [N]o inspired bard immortalized the heroes’ deeds.’7 Cornelius Moynihan, the Brisbane poet discussed more fully by Patrick Buckridge in his chapter, grappled with such sentiments in writing his long poem The Feast of the Bunya (1901). He certainly considered the material to have the potential for an epic along classical lines, but in his introduction argued that such a work ‘can never be written in the absence of an aboriginal [sic] genius’. Rather than projecting himself into the minds and emotions of his characters, Moynihan describes the bunya festivals from the point of view of an external observer. The Feast of the Bunya begins with the journey of the Moreton Bay clans to the Bunya Mountains: From the fair shores of Bribie, To Cook and Flinders known, Caloundra to Elimbah, Famed for the pumice stone . . . From lofty Beearburrum, Home of the feathery grass, Toomboomoolla, Beearwah, Mountains of glittering glass; From woody-crowned Maroochie, Where grow the kauri pines; Cootharaba, Illandra, To Gympie’s precious mines; From where the glossy mangroves, Woomgoompa’s saltmarsh hide; Where the frail craft, with flapping sail, Drifts with the ebbing tide; From the low channel islands, Whose oyster banks between, With many a sandy shallow, Extend to far Tuleen;

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With each a separate leader, By differing paths and roads, And some with scarce a nulla, And some with grievous loads; Armed with their native weapons, In all their proud array – To Mobolon are marching The tribes of Moreton Bay. By the end of the poem, the tribes – like most of the bunyas – have vanished, but the ‘pioneer residents’ of the Bunya Mountains have assimilated the qualities of ‘those easy-going late aboriginal [sic] inhabitants’, and live in an ‘ideal state’ of harmony with the natural environment.This motif of symbolic ‘reconciliation’ effected retrospectively by the colonisers – perhaps indicative of a strongly felt need for moral redemption – appears later in Roy Connolly’s epic novel, Southern Saga (1940), which also makes extensive use of Aboriginal legends and history in a dramatic account of the colonisation of the bunya lands.8 Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves (1976) also reflects on early colonial history; based loosely on the story of Eliza Fraser, it chronicles the fictional Ellen Roxburgh’s extended sojourn with Aborigines after a shipwreck, and her subsequent recovery in the Moreton Bay settlement.9 Like the bunya region north of Brisbane, the Logan Valley to the south figures prominently as an important early literary landscape in Queensland writing, reflecting its importance in the rural economy of the early colony. In several novels by Rosa Praed, this setting provides a counterpoint to the representation of political life in ‘Leichardt’s [sic] Town’, which is a thinly veiled portrait of Brisbane, as discussed earlier by Patrick Buckridge. Praed’s main characters are typically close to the centre of power in the new colony, but their wealth and status derive from the land. In the Logan environment, they are depicted as landed gentry in the English tradition, but transposed to a strange and sometimes threatening environment. In Policy and Passion (1881), The Head Station (1885) and Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893)10 the Logan valley is the setting for the kind of rural enterprise on which the wealth of the new colony is based, but it is also portrayed as a natural environment whose

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beauty can be a benign source of recreation or a sublime wilderness that unleashes tragic potentialities. In Policy and Passion, the restorative and recreational potential of the landscape is elaborated in the chapter ‘A Picnic in the Mountains’, where the local landowners – who also play leading political roles in Leichardt’s Town – conduct a kangaroo hunt with hounds, which is followed by a picnic at Koorong Crag (based on Mount Lindesay). The underlying menace of this sublime landscape, however, is never far from the surface. On the picnic a visiting English aristocrat is bitten by a whip-snake and falls over a precipice, though he survives. In Outlaw and Lawmaker, Lord Horace Gage (a character based loosely on Henry Phipps, Lord Lorne, who owned property in the Logan valley) is less fortunate: he dies after being bitten by a death adder on the eerie slopes of Mount Luya (again, a fictionalised representation of Mt Lindesay). In this novel, Rosa Praed uses Baròlin Waterfall on Mount Luya as the setting for a doomed love affair between the bushranger-cum-politician Morres Blake and the spirited young Elsie Valliant. At the end of Outlaw and Lawmaker, Blake throws himself over the waterfall, whose potential for both exaltation and tragedy is foreshadowed in the author’s first description of the site: The waterfall . . . could hardly be equalled in picturesqueness, as it stole from the black masses of the scrub, with the grand girdling precipice just above . . . The jagged pines gave a certain weirdness to the scene, and the utter absence of any sign of humanity added to its extreme wildness and desolation. For Praed, the notion that the ‘foot of European has never trod’ here, and that ‘the Blacks’ have a ‘superstitious reverence, amounting to terror, for this region’ heightens the emotional power of the landscape, as does the remoteness of the upper Logan, which could be reached only through Ipswich and the Dugandan Scrub, a journey that took several days.11 While Praed used Aboriginal legends to reinforce and heighten her English readers’ perceptions of the Queensland landscape as romantic and sublime, other writers struggled to respond to a landscape which, as

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Stable and Kirwood put it, held for the European diaspora ‘no glamour of past romance’.12 Francis Kenna, who wrote for the Sydney Bulletin as ‘K’ and edited the Logan and Albert Bulletin, published Songs of a Season in 1895. Most of these slight poems in the Celtic twilight tradition have only the most tenuous sense of place, but in ‘The Dead Lagoon’ Kenna draws on an association with Aboriginal legends to heighten the local colour: ‘Oft the dusky native father / Sitting by his trembling child’ sings of the legend ‘fraught with terror’ of this ‘shunned and dreaded region.’13 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many wellknown poets wrote occasional poems about various scenic points in the natural environment around Brisbane. Emily Coungeau, who lived on Bribie Island for many years, uses her nature poetry to bring the Queensland landscape into the imperial project. Her understanding of herself as a public poet is reflected in the formality of her acrostic, ‘The Glasshouse Mountains, Queensland’, the first two stanzas of which sufficiently suggest the lofty tenor of the poem: T Thou mighty Monoliths of Nature’s mould, H Horologes of time and seasons which have rolled E Ere mortals’ drama on life’s stage begun. G Gray oceans hid thee in oblivion. L Lo! In the archaic rocks thy feet were laid, A And Saurian monsters once around thee played, S Sun, moon and stars alone thy forms had viewed, S Standing in weird mysterious solitude. H Heaving and shuddering with internal wrath O Out from thy vitals Jovian bolts came forth: U Unchained thy fury and malignant ire, S Spirits of Vulcan poured their liquid fire, E Epochs rolled on. The waves retreating fled.14 By contrast, Alice Ham entices her reader to participate in her joyful experience of nature in ‘Burleigh Heads’ (1886):

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Set your foot on the sloping stone, Swing by a vine stem – so! Above are the vaulted boughs alone; Beneath, where the drift is upward thrown, The weltering waters go.15 Such lyric ecstasy also characterises the work of Brisbane poet Emily Hemans Bulcock, Vance Palmer’s sister, who had a long association with Caloundra. In Jacaranda Blooms (1923), her poems ‘Caloundra’ and ‘Montville to Mapleton’ emphasise the ‘romance’ of nature: Caloundra is a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ whose ‘charm is hidden from careless eyes’; the Glasshouses are ‘weird’ in the sunset, and Montville is an ‘enchanted land’.16 ‘Curramundi – Caloundra’ in From Quenchless Springs (c. 1945) goes further, using religious language to describe the effects of nature on an acolyte: Sunset at Curramundi, well might move the heart to prayer, The day grows great in giving, as to splendid death she goes: Far off the Glasshouse Mountains stand like giant guardians there, On purpling Blackall Ranges, bush-fires, like torches flare! And soft with benediction the healing darkness grows.17 Here Bulcock foreshadows later writers in finding a restorative spiritual force in the natural environment.

‘The place has become part of us’: the Palmers and Eleanor Dark Emily Bulcock’s brother,Vance Palmer, and his wife Nettie Palmer lived in Caloundra from 1925 to 1929, an extremely productive period of their careers. According to biographer Vivian Smith, it was here that Vance Palmer ‘conceived and wrote in a first form or re-wrote the small group of novels on which his reputation as a novelist rests’ and ‘[t]hese years too saw Nettie Palmer’s greatest activity as a critic’.18 When the Palmers returned to Melbourne, Nettie reflected on the legacy of their time at Caloundra: Quiet days of work, with odd hours on the beaches or the flowerplain; and then the breaks at the week-end – tramping up barefooted over the wet sand to picnic at Curramundi, or rowing over to the

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lee side of Bribie Island. There’s been time to read and think, even to enjoy the company of the casual visitors who’ve wandered in. People don’t unbutton themselves so easily in town. What long talks we’ve had on this old veranda, looking down at Maloney’s boat coming in or watching the swans flying up the Passage about sunset! . . . [T]he place has become part of us.19 The profound effect of a place on human lives is powerfully evoked in Vance Palmer’s novel The Passage (1930), which is set in and around Caloundra.The central character, Lew Callaway, is shaped by his environment: ‘It came to him that almost since his boyhood there had been an inner life going on in him like the movement among the swaying grasses of the sea-floor.’20 Unlike those characters who fight against the natural environment, Lew is able to move forward confidently into the future. The influence of the environment on people’s lives – symbolised by the ineradicable lantana – is also evident in Eleanor Dark’s Lantana Lane (1959), written during her seven years in Montville. This collection of stories about ‘a bunch of unrepentant anachronisms assembled in Lantana Lane’ draws a parallel between the small farmer and the artist: The small-scale production of sustenance – whether mental, physical or spiritual – exposes the producer to certain subversive influences – namely nature and solitude. These influences render him quite unfit for useful participation in the affairs of an advanced civilisation, for they make him think, and wait, and stare, and dream . . . What makes small-scale activity so undesirable is clearly the solitude it involves, and the temptation inherent in solitude, to think. Lantana Lane, a collection that experiments playfully with the essay and short-story genres, celebrates the lantana-like resistance of small-scale producers to the capitalist ideology of the ‘expanding era’ where ‘the one thing that contracts is time’.21

Nature as wilderness While the work of the Palmers and Eleanor Dark is inspired by the settled fishing and farming communities of the Sunshine Coast, a different

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literary approach to South-East Queensland was also emerging by the 1930s, based on the idea of nature as wilderness. In 1908 the first National Park in Queensland was created at Witches Falls on Mt Tamborine, heralding the beginning of a battle to conserve biodiversity in the region. During the twentieth century the environmental movement came into conflict with various economic interests, such as logging, farming, mining and tourism, over the fate of South-East Queensland’s rainforests and sand dunes. The inclusion of the Queensland section of the border rainforests in the Central Eastern Rainforests Reserves (Australia) World Heritage area in 1994 represented a significant victory for environmentalists. Interest in the idea of nature as wilderness arose in part out of the climbing culture of South-East Queensland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 The 1937 Stinson air crash also impressed on the imagination of the Queensland public the dramatic scenery and isolation of the McPherson Range. Green Mountains (1940), Bernard O’Reilly’s account of his discovery of the survivors of the crash, emphasises the rugged natural beauty of this region: Masses of tree ferns were gathered round; great lilies were banked on either side; ropes of lawyer vine, with their palm-like leaves dipped in low festoons over this small torrent[;] on either side, and meeting overhead, were the ancient Antarctic beeches covered with moss, which dripped from the drifting spray of the waterfalls and from the ever present moisture which goes with mountains almost eternally enveloped in cloud.23

Judith Wright’s ‘passion of vision’ In the second half of the twentieth century, rainforests – along with sandy coasts and islands – became key symbols of the beauty, complexity and fragility of South-East Queensland’s natural heritage. Judith Wright, both as poet and environmentalist, was the foremost interpreter of this landscape. Judith Wright lived on Mt Tamborine from the late 1940s until the early 1970s and also frequently visited Cooloola on the Sunshine Coast. Out of her close observation and love of the natural environment

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of South-East Queensland, she came to see the human role ‘as a new obligation for the continued existence of the earth and its doings and beings’.24 For Wright, the value of the landscape is no longer merely aesthetic, recreational or restorative. Unlike earlier writers, she links a sense of place to the history of human interaction with the environment; a growing awareness of the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the destruction of the land underpins her lyrical response to nature. In ‘The Lost Man’ (The Gateway, 1953), the fate of James Westray, the young Englishman who survived the Stinson crash but died in his attempt to walk down the mountain to raise the alarm, might represent the bewildering journey of all newcomers to this land: To reach the pool you must go through the rain-forest – through the bewildering midsummer of darkness lit with ancient fern, laced with poison and thorn. Awareness, achieved only at the moment of death, comes through a bodily experience which is likened to the passion of Christ: ‘the way of the bleeding / hands and feet, the blood on the stones like flowers’.25 Wright’s growing unease over the role played by her own family in the dispossession of Aboriginal people finds expression in ‘At Cooloolah’ (The Two Fires, 1955). A blue crane is ‘the certain heir of lake and evening’, but I’m a stranger, come of a conquering people, I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake, being unloved by all my eyes delight in, and made uneasy, for an old murder’s sake. A ‘driftwood spear / thrust from the water’ reminds her of her grandfather’s story of having seen a ghost, ‘a black accoutred warrior’. Like her grandfather, she ‘must quiet a heart accused by its own fear’.26 Wright’s large body of work – poetry, prose, essays – much of it written at Mt Tamborine, grapples with the question of how to move forward from dispossession and destruction. Always, however, as Wright

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made explicit in ‘The Morning of the Dead’ (Five Senses, 1953), the act of creating works of art is a large part of the answer: let the thin bubble of blown glass, the passion of vision that is art, refine, reflect and gather the moving pattern of all things in consummation and their rejoicing.27 Wright’s years in South-East Queensland played a key role in forging her ‘passion / of vision’.

‘Let no one say the past is dead’: Oodgeroo Kath Walker, who took the name Oodgeroo Noonuccal in the 1980s, was an important influence on Judith Wright from their meeting in 1963. We Are Going (1964), the first published collection of poems by an Indigenous Australian, powerfully expresses Oodgeroo’s anger at the ongoing dispossession of her people. While they contribute to a national debate, these poems derive their intensity from being rooted in personal and local experience, and many of the poems refer to particular individuals. ‘The Dispossessed’ is dedicated to Uncle Willie McKenzie of the Dongiya tribe from the Caboolture district: Peace was yours, Australian man, with tribal laws you made, Till white Colonials stole your peace with rape and murder raid; They shot and poisoned and enslaved until, a scattered few, Only a remnant now remain, and the heart dies in you. Fruitless promises of equality and justice are like a second dispossession: ‘so slow the justice due, / Courage decays for want of hope, and the heart dies in you.’28 Oodgeroo wrote about places as cultural landscapes, meaningful because of the way they shape, and have been shaped by, the human presence. In ‘Gooboora, the Silent Pool’, dedicated to Grannie Sunflower, the place (now known as Lake Karboora on North Stradbroke Island) continues to exist, but its meaning is diminished:

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Gooboora, Gooboora, the Water of Fear, That awed the Noonuccals once numerous here, The Bunyip is gone from your bone-strewn bed, And the clans departed to drift with the dead. Gooboora, Gooboora, it makes the heart sore That you should be here but my people no more!29 The poems in Oodgeroo’s later volume, The Dawn Is at Hand (1966), arose out of her belief that the past survives in the present: Let no one say the past is dead. The past is all about us and within. Haunted by tribal memories, I know This little now, this accidental present Is not the all of me, whose long making Is so much of the past. 30 The ‘long making’ of the present also underlies Oodgeroo’s various collections of stories. Stradbroke Dreamtime contains childhood recollections as well as traditional stories. Although these works celebrate the strength and endurance of Aboriginal culture, the destructive effects of colonisation are never far from the surface. In ‘Stradbroke’, she deplores the changes brought by a second invasion of her island in the form of an ‘assault on nature’ by ‘greedy mineral seekers’ and tourists. 31 Her own journey is symbolically told in ‘Oodgeroo’ (which means ‘paperbark’), about a girl who ‘longed for her lost tribe, and for the stories that had belonged to her people’. Through marking paperbark trees with the charred sticks from the dead fires of lost tribes, she finds her way back to the old Dreamtime.32

Transitions The natural landscapes of South-East Queensland continue to inspire lyric poetry – recent examples include Michael Sariban’s Facing the Pacific (1999) and poems by David Malouf in The Year of the Foxes (1979) and First Things Last (1980)33 – but since the 1950s prose has burgeoned. Rosa

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Praed’s early depiction of the dark wooded mountain environments of South-East Queensland as picturesque but ‘weird’ (in the Old English sense of having the power to control the fate of human beings) is echoed in the late twentieth century by Janette Turner Hospital. Turner Hospital’s fifth novel, The Last Magician, has at its core a series of seminal events (including sexual awakening, betrayal and death) experienced by a group of young friends at Cedar Creek Falls, near Samford.This paradise, when lost, is seen always to have contained the seeds of its own destruction, and becomes a metaphor for Queensland itself: The wood is dark, and full of the soft rot and manic growth we call rainforest. The rainforest has always spawned secrets. Light itself is clandestine here. Under the matted canopy the sun becomes furtive, it flickers, it advances by stealth, it hides, it is coy, it sneaks down through the tangle of treetops, creepers, leggy bird’s-nest ferns, lianas, orchids, battling its way earthwards through layers of aerial clamour, slithering below ground fungi to breed green yeast. The rainforest smells of seduction and fermentation and death. It smells of Queensland.34 Curiously – given the rich tradition of rainforest poetry – The Last Magician stands peerless in recent decades as a major novel of the Brisbane region inspired by this luxuriant environment, to which Turner Hospital gives a literary genealogy extending back through Dante to the Bible. The focus of novelists and short-story writers has instead shifted to coastal environments, to the extent that Frank Moorhouse has described the Gold Coast as ‘one of the most potent narrative sites in Australia’.35 This shift coincides with the postwar metamorphosis of the Gold Coast from an unpretentious getaway for Brisbane families into Australia’s foremost holiday destination. In Keith Leopold’s My Brow Is Wet (1969), a Brisbane academic, lured by ‘a strange sense of freedom and elation’, is drawn into the criminal world that is an inherent part of the Gold Coast’s transformation from ‘primitive’ backwater to artificial pleasuredome. Surfers Paradise is the hollow and deceptive ‘Glitterlights’ in Thea Astley’s The Acolyte (1972), and in David Malouf ’s Johnno (1975) ‘staid old-fashioned Brisbane’ is sharply contrasted in Johnno’s imagination with the ‘wickedly alternative life’ of the Gold Coast ‘only sixty miles

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away’, where ‘[a]mong its harlequin motels, Florida, El Dorado, Las Vegas, call girls had begun to operate, and a fast crowd from the South was continuously at play’. The artificiality of the Gold Coast is now more remarked upon than its natural attributes, and it is often represented in literature as a simulacrum. Peter Goldsworthy’s Honk If You Are Jesus (1992), for instance, is set at Hollis Schultz University, which includes a Bible Theme Park and an imitation of the Notre Dame Cathedral. Matthew Condon in A Night at the Pink Poodle (1995) depicts the Gold Coast as ‘Brisbane’s Riviera’: This was the imagined territory of white robes and champagne and flirting and sex and pyjama parties and bikinis and endless fantasies a hundred kilometres from the office blocks of Brisbane. It became a state of mind.36 As all these writers suggest, the Gold Coast – whether in spite of or because of its illusoriness – has an extraordinary hold on the imagination. In Elizabeth Webb’s Into the Morning (1958), the Gold Coast is a place where new possibilities can be imagined and enacted. Toddy Vine, the ‘half-caste’ narrator, visits Mermaid Beach as the chauffeur of a Brisbane politician: We drove through the modern, bright-painted shopping centre of Surfers’ Paradise, with its big brick hotel where nobs from all over the world come and spend their winters, to where the road runs into bushland again, between the sand-dunes. In this transitional place, where everybody ‘is baked as brown as a chip’, on the dunes where land meets sea, he begins an empowering love affair with an older white woman, Ana Perez.Toddy finds both self-acceptance and love on the Gold Coast: ‘I can’t remember any time in my life when I was so happy.’37 The theme of the coast as a transitional or liminal space where rites of passage or life-changing experiences occur is taken up strongly in many later novels. Experimental sexual encounters often occur during a coastal interlude: Paul and Hilda make their first ‘fumbling interpretations’ of sex

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at ‘a sea-anted hotel down the coast’ in Thea Astley’s The Acolyte, while in Georgia Savage’s The Estuary (1987), widow Vinnie Beaumont has an affair with the ‘liberated’ Marcia Scott: ‘On an evening softened by a big persimmon moon, I let Marcia make love to me in the rough grass which bordered the beach . . . I stayed there as shameless and receptive as a sea anemone while she set about showing me her expertise in lesbian lovemaking.’38 In Malouf ’s Fly Away Peter (1982), working-class drifter Jim Saddler and landowner Ashley Crowther meet in the coastal swamps, drawn by a common interest in birdwatching. Like Lew in Palmer’s The Passage, Jim is a character formed by bodily contact with the natural world; although inarticulate, he is deeply connected with natural rhythms and possesses what might be described as ecological or bodily intelligence. In Fly Away Peter the coastal swamps signify a landscape where ‘new things could enter and find a place’, and this novel about the Great War ends, after the death of Jim and the wounding of Ashley in Europe, with the ecstatic, forward-looking image of a youth ‘walking – no, running, on the water’ on ‘a kind of plank’ – a harbinger of the surfing culture that would develop after another world war.39 The instability and formlessness of coastal topography, however, can also be unsettling. ‘How can people be so sure of the boundary between land and sea that they have the confidence to [build] houses on it?’ asks Helen Garner in ‘Postcards from Surfers’ (1985).40 In Matthew Condon’s A Night at the Pink Poodle, real estate agent Icarus lives in a penthouse apartment ‘on a thin finger of sand between Main Beach and Surfers Paradise’ (Narrowneck). Icarus’s growing obsession with the impermanence of land speculation and the instability of personal identity is reinforced by his view of the Gold Coast from a helicopter: I had never realised how watery the whole place was, how precarious . . . I was amazed at the infrastructure so tenuously stacked on fingers of what were nothing more than strips and nodules of sand. From that height it looked as though it would take nothing more than a slight rise in the level of the ocean, the tiniest increase, and we’d all go under . . . I began to see the canals behind the beachfront as threatening. The surf as a killer in waiting. And the Nerang River as a serpent, silver and solid when it caught the sun.

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At the same time, this protean quality is fecund with imaginative possibilities: ‘Perhaps it was what made the coast so mad, so colourful and bizarre and full of pleasure and conflict. Here it was, teetering on the edge of the Pacific, leaning towards the sea, electric with river currents and the draw of the surf.’41 In Malouf ’s poems, too, place shapes consciousness. In ‘Glasshouse Mountains’, the seascape of the northern part of Moreton Bay metamorphoses into a mindscape, evoking the power of those suggestive peaks – ‘seen always across / a bay called Deception’ – to enter the dreams of boys and men; they are giants unkilled who walk tonight the moonlit water – lanes of my sleep.42 Malouf ’s words resonate with Eleanor Dark’s earlier description of these eerie mountains: It is noticeable that sightseers do not so much look at them as watch them, with an almost suspicious attention . . . [T]hey have such an air of impermanence, and even of unreality, as to seem less like hills than hallucinations.43

Conclusion The representation of Brisbane’s hinterland as a space for recreation, restoration and creative inspiration remains an important theme of both poetry and prose, surviving the transition of large swathes of this landscape from natural paradise to artificial pleasure-dome. There are, however, signs of change. As conurbation proliferates, the distinction between urban Brisbane and its ‘natural’ hinterland becomes increasingly blurred. Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Steam Pigs (1997) is set in ‘slumcity’ (Logan City), on the freeway between Brisbane and Southport; the one hope for the young Murri protagonist, Sue Wilson, is to head up the freeway to gain an education in Brisbane, in an ironic reversal of the usual literary motif of Brisbane youths, typified by Thea Astley’s Keith Leverson in The Slow Natives, escaping to the Gold Coast.44

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Development, however, has had the unexpected side effect of attracting writers to the area. Over the last few decades, the beaches and mountains of South-East Queensland have become the home to many writers, although not all of them use it as a setting for their work. Peter Carey lived in an ‘alternative’ community at Yandina in the 1970s, and most of the stories in War Crimes (1979) were written in this rainforest setting.45 Nancy Cato lived in Noosa from the 1970s until her death in 2000, and wrote The Noosa Story (1979), an historical account of the area.46 Kristin and David Williamson spend part of the year at Noosa, and Peter Corris also lives on the Sunshine Coast. Stephanie Bennett, Lesley Singh and children’s author Jill Morris are associated with the thriving community of artists on the Blackall Range, and more recently James Cowan has settled in the area. Popular historical novelist Patricia Shaw lives on the Gold Coast and romance novelist Jennifer Bacia on Mt Tamborine. A literary infrastructure is also developing rapidly. The Gold Coast campus of Griffith University has a large creative writing program, and the Gold Coast Writers Association was established in 1990. The Sunshine Coast too has a number of writers’ associations, including the Sunshine Coast Writers’ Group and the Noosa Creative Writers’ Group. The Gold and Sunshine coasts, and even the river valleys that stretch into the Scenic Rim, are no longer figured as the antithesis of urban life, either in the popular imagination or in literature. Increasingly, these areas are developing their own distinctive and complex identities, in which the contrast between ‘natural’ and ‘urban’ values operates ambiguously and at a highly localised level.The creative possibilities of these internal tensions are glimpsed by Matthew Condon’s character Icarus, as he parasails above the Gold Coast: I had never realised until now the two worlds of the coast that brushed against each other. The metropolis, and then, suddenly the primitive backwaters that stretched up to Moreton Bay – the hundreds of islands of mangrove and bird tracks and nests and the millions of yabbies down there in the foul black mud, pincering through it, thrashing their tails in the darkness . . .47

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As Malouf suggests in Fly Away Peter, it is precisely at the intersection of different worlds that ‘new things’ can ‘enter and find a place’. Over the past 150 odd years, the hinterland has been reinvented as a landscape, economy and culture, and in literature it has become much more than a ‘natural’ counterpoint to ‘urban’ Brisbane: it is now represented as a protean site of great internal diversity where new lifestyles and new imaginative possibilities are generated.

‘From Progress into Stand-still Days’: Literature, History and the Darling Downs Christopher Lee Geographically the Darling Downs is a series of rolling grassy plains which extend from the Great Dividing Range in the east through the Condamine River catchment area and westwards in the direction of the Darling River system in southern Queensland. It is one of the world’s richest agricultural regions and its colonial history is dominated by the reluctant transition from a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer people to the widely dispersed pastoral holdings of an invasive squattocracy and ultimately to agricultural development and closer settlement by smaller landholders. Its three main municipalities are Toowoomba on the escarpment of the Great Dividing Range in the north-east, Warwick in the south-east and Dalby in the west.1 Information on the Indigenous inhabitants of this European division of space prior to the settler invasion is scant. Tindale describes four tribes – Barunggam, Jarowair, Giabul and Keinjan – who shared the Waka Waka language with tribal variations.2 The Indigenous occupation of the region dates back some 40,000 years and the population at the time of white contact is thought to have numbered between 1,500 and 2,500. The Indigenes were a hunter-gatherer people who moved through their recognised tribal territories in small familial groups according to seasonal and cultural demands. They adapted their labour and technology so as to sustain ‘a stable population in a balanced environment’ and ‘this allowed the development of increasingly complex social systems and cultural

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traditions’.3 The invasion of the region by Europeans led to the violent dispossession of the Indigenous population. Today it is difficult to trace many traditional people in the region, although there remains a significant population of people of Indigenous descent.

Settler invaders and the industrious expectations of civilisation The first white man to stumble across the Darling Downs was the explorer Allan Cunningham, who wandered through the area from June 1827. He returned the following year to find a pass through the range, Cunningham’s Gap, which would link the region to Moreton Bay and the coast. In 1841 an aspiring squatter, Patrick Leslie, re-explored the Downs and claimed an extensive run on its south-eastern reach. Leslie was quickly followed by the Hodgsons, Campbells, Archers, Russells, Gores and Gammies, and together they founded a squatting dynasty that was to prosper up until the 1880s and 1890s, when the Selection Acts of 1862 and 1868 finally led to the development of smaller agricultural holdings and closer settlement. Writing played its part in this invasion, as the intruders quickly brought the representational strategies of colonial dispossession to bear on the imaginative task of claiming their new-found place. The pioneering squatter Arthur Hodgson, for example, chose to represent himself in spatial command of a landscape that was divinely prepared for his industrious expectations: I remember well how delighted I was to find myself, on the second day after leaving the sheep and drays, in a beautiful country, consisting of open Downs, with a stream intersecting them, and surrounded by park-like scenery. It was a pleasant feeling, that of galloping over new and untrodden soil, where no white man was to be seen; the poor black fellow, with his gins and picaninnies, the timid kangaroo, the fleet emu, and the prowling native dog, or jackal of Australia, were all that could be seen. They all fled at our approach, scarcely giving themselves time to consider what we could be; for many reasons we did not follow, but kept on the even tenor of our way, regarding the green sward and the deep-water holes as pleasant to look upon, and admirably calculated to refresh our sheep, horses, and bullocks.4

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In one fell rhetorical swoop Hodgson consigned the Aboriginal people to the simple, knowable and apparently apolitical category of the natural, alongside the region’s native flora and fauna.The Indigenes in Hodgson’s memoir romantically embellish the entrance of a pioneer hero by representing an exotic uncivilised past that is carefully framed by his narrative in the historical moment of its colonial supersession. The Indigenous inhabitants were not going to be conjured away from their traditional lands solely by the self-interested processes of colonial representation, however, and the squatters had to disperse the original owners by depriving them of their water supplies, thinning out the native fauna they depended on for food, and denying access to locations necessary to the practice of tribal customs and rituals. Aboriginal tribes defended their territory, culture and society with hit-and-run raids on shepherds and stock and this conflict enabled the intruders to openly organise more immediately violent methods of persuasion.5 Steele Rudd took up this subject in the 1920s in The Romance of Runnibede, an historical novel set on the Western Downs during the native resistance: But the squatters there were in the Never-Never Land who nursed bitter grudges against the black people. It was difficult for them to keep their guns silent whenever they came in contact with any of them; and in retaliation the tribes attacked the lonely shepherds, and at times a homestead, fired the grasses, and speared the stock. These depredations were reported to the police, and at long intervals after their occurrences a body of mounted ‘trackers,’ [sic] would scour the country in search of the accused ones, and the accusations were mostly made wholesale. When they came across a tribe, or the remnant of one, that ‘dropped their bundles and ran,’ they judged them guilty, and would gallop rings round them, give any that looked dangerous a taste of shot, and head them all like cattle from that locality to some other corner in the Back of Beyond. Such official displays were called ‘Dispersals by the Police,’ and thereby many a pretty bush daisy bloomed on the innocent blood of the wild blacks.6 The guerilla war with the invading Europeans appears to have reached a climax in 1843 with what is now known as the Battle of One Tree Hill.7

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James Arrowsmith showed the versatility of letters in the colonial situation by composing a mock heroic poem to celebrate the occasion: Oh! ’twas glorious to see those free sons of the soil, Unfetter’d by garments, uninjured by toil, Streaming down to the valley – as shining and black As Newcastle coals shooting out of the sack. Each warrior was greas’d from heel to the head; Each cobra was charcoal’d – each limb streaked with red; And plain might you see that each snake-eating elf Was inclined to think no table beer of himself. They’d a forest of spears that would turn a man pale, Like a cheveux-de-frize on the wall of a gaol; And they bore in each girdle the swift boomerang, And a toothpick, the lugs of the whiteman to bang. The war song was sung – the corroboree done, And they cried ‘with the whitefellows let’s have some fun. They have settled old Moppy – a life for a life – So death to the Croppy, and war to the knife.’8 ‘Arrowsmith’ was the pseudonym for William Wilkes, a ticket-of-leave station hand based on a nearby run at Helidon. His mock epic uses a different rhetorical mode to Hodgson, but both narratives insist on the inconsequential nature of the Indigene.The satire denies native resistance the historical dignity of a military engagement. Without a war, invasion is settlement and the dispossessed natives cannot be entitled to the legal claims of their prior possession. As is always the case with the use of the satiric or ironic mode, however, an alternative view is there to be discerned by another readership in a different ideological climate. The white invaders may well have thought that they had vanquished the native population by the middle of the century, but the work of a later writer presented a very different view of the Indigenous tribes to the west of the Darling Downs. Alice Monkton Duncan-Kemp was born

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in Charleville in 1901 and educated at Fairholme College in Toowoomba and All Hallows convent in Brisbane.9 Her association with the Channel Country of South-West Queensland is discussed more fully in Part 3 of this book, but from 1939 until her death in 1988 she lived in a number of places on the Darling Downs: Oakey (1939–47), Jondaryan (1947–50), Rosalie Plains (1959–62) and then Oakey again from 1962 on. DuncanKemp’s five books published between 1933 and 1971 on her experiences and knowledge of the Indigenous tribes of south-west Queensland represent a remarkable personal account of the history and ethnography of these people and pointedly refute the imperialist accounts that disavow Indigenous claims to both the land and the sophisticated level of human culture deemed requisite for ‘civilisation’. By the 1850s, the declining Indigenous population on the Darling Downs was finding employment on the stations, as the gold rush and the end of convict transportation made white labour hard to come by. The settler population now numbered over 2,500 and the region was divided into forty-nine licensed squatting runs. In the early days of frontier society, life was organised around hard work in difficult conditions, and the cultivated pursuits and material possessions that marked class distinctions in the civilised world were in short supply.10 Many of the squatters had reasonable libraries and some sealed the walls of their early slab dwellings with pages from London magazines such as Punch and The Illustrated London News.11 For many visitors and settlers on the Downs, however, the sign of successful settlement was the presence of a woman and the civilised appointments she brought to the home: Why was [Mr W] so odd and untidy, so comfortless and careless? Not because he had not the means of being otherwise, for he possessed a fine run of goodly flock, but simply because he had no wife . . . On our journey we lunched at a house the very opposite of this in comfort, neatness, and really, we might say in elegance. A neat verandah ran round the building, interlaced with creepers, the passion flower and jessamine with a pretty terraced garden. Within, the apartments had the air of well furbished English drawing-rooms, and we were waited upon by a page in green broadcloth, variegated with buttons. This abode belonged to one of the earliest settlers on the downs; his

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wife, whom we discovered . . . to be native, [born in Australia], was a lady-like person, pretty, lively, and accomplished, and doubtless to her taste he was indebted for so much comfort and elegance. It was quite a cottage ornée.12 The demise of the Indigene, the opening of transport routes down the range to Moreton Bay and the presence of a domestic life and its associated social practices indicated the coming of civilisation for the squatters. Their historical significance in the development of what became the state of Queensland is well documented in the first Queensland novel, Colin Munro’s Fern Vale, or the Queensland Squatter, as well as in two historical works or memoirs, John Campbell’s The Early History of Queensland (1875) and John Stuart Russell’s Genesis of Queensland (1888). By the 1880s, however, a new and more formidable enemy was threatening to consign the great landholders themselves to the colonial past. The end of the century and the beginning of the next belonged to the small landholder.13

On our selections: the small landholders and the rise of a civic culture Australian colonial history is often written as a struggle to open up the large tracts of land occupied by squatters so that more modestly capitalised and smaller-scale agriculturalists could gain access. The dream of a prosperous democratic and liberal society was imagined by many as the spread of small landholders and their family-run properties. The shift from large-scale pastoral production to smaller-scale agricultural holdings was managed by a series of Selection Acts which were intended to convert the squatters’ leases over to freehold and at the same time open up some of that land to a new generation of free selectors. A developing middle or merchant class in the emerging townships largely supported the associated shift from large-scale pastoralism to smaller-scale agriculture, for it inevitably led to closer settlement and a broader base for commercial opportunity. Arthur Hoey Davis owes his substantial popular reputation to comic representations of the trials and tribulations of the small selector on the Darling Downs.14 Davis, who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Steele Rudd’, was the son of a blacksmith who selected land at Emu Creek just

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south of Toowoomba in 1870. He left school at the age of twelve in 1880 and spent the next five years working on properties in the area. In 1885 his mother used political connections to secure her son a public service place in Brisbane and the young man moved to the big city. In the 1890s Davis began to write his comic stories, which appeared in the Sydney Bulletin from 1895.15 With the assistance of A. G. Stephens, a Toowoomba-born writer, editor, publisher and critic who was the most influential man of letters in colonial Australia, he revised a number of stories so that they formed a connected sequence depicting the struggles of a family of rural peasants, the Rudds. On Our Selection was published in 1899 by the Bulletin book company, and Dad, Dave and ‘Steele Rudd’ were on the way to becoming national sensations. Rudd went on to publish more than twenty works of fiction and six plays, including ten books dealing with the gradual if often tragic success of the Rudd family. Dad and Dave Rudd also featured in a number of popular plays, three silent movies, four ‘talkies’ and a long-running radio series that became a national institution. Davis’s life and work is an exemplary instance of tensions and difficulties associated with the classification of regional writing. Memories of his rural youth sustained him in the early years of his successful public service career in Brisbane, until his success as a writer and growing connections with the Sydney literati saw him grow enamoured of the fashionable bohemianism of Sydney letters. Financial pressures ultimately saw his journey turn full circle, however, and in 1907 he returned to the Downs to farm a small property, without much success. It was an occupation for which the metropolitan man of letters was now ill-suited.16 Richard Fotheringham, Davis’s biographer, has argued that in his stories Davis exposed the difficulties of selection life and its demeaning effect upon human character and behaviour in a way that undercut the grand democratic theories of liberal parliamentarians. The subtle use of wry humour sweetened the grim reality for those who would identify with the Rudd family, but it also enabled more sophisticated audiences to see them as figures of fun. There is a great deal in the Rudd formula that would prove illuminating for present-day politicians seeking to reconcile the differences between regional and metropolitan electorates.The comic predicaments, the indomitable spirit of Davis’s bucolic characters, and the

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gradual almost imperceptible improvement of their material conditions as Dad moves from impoverished selector and rural battler to a seat in Parliament, inevitably endorse the liberal endeavour of the pioneering myth. The wry tone of much of this work, however, opens it up to audiences with different regional and political affiliations. According to the historian Maurice French, the city of Toowoomba developed its sense of itself principally from Davis’s descriptions and those of one other writer, the British expatriate poet George Essex Evans.17 Evans was born in London in 1863 and immigrated to Australia in 1881, where he worked as a farmer, a teacher, an editor, a journalist and a public servant. The poet spent most of his life on the Darling Downs, mixed extensively with the local people and became very involved in the cultural and political life of the region’s premier city. Evans is best known for his verse, but during his life he was an allround and highly respected man of letters, with a wide range of talents and interests. In addition to poetry, he produced articles and short stories, wrote travel books for the Government Tourist and Intelligence Bureau, and became one of the founding members of the Austral Association for the advancement of art, science, music and literature, which drew thousands of people to its annual festivals in Toowoomba. Evans edited the agricultural section of The Queenslander, several issues of an illustrated journal The Antipodean, and still found the time to write some plays for the Brisbane theatre.18 The broad range of Essex Evans’s literary production demonstrates his commitment to the civic function of culture. In his verse he celebrated the pioneers, public and political figures, and the natural beauty of the environment in a manner free from the misgivings that make Davis’s work so interesting. Evans was an important public poet who did much to promote the cause of federation in Queensland – a cause which was notably unpopular in Toowoomba. In 1901 he won first prize in the New South Wales government’s competition for a ‘Commonwealth ode’ – with a poem that had been seen and edited by Alfred Deakin prior to the competition. He was also, at the same time, an ardent supporter of the Empire, and his ode ‘The Crown of Empire’ was printed on white satin and presented by the then Australian prime minister Edmund Barton to King Edward VII on the occasion of the king’s coronation.19 On

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Davis’s death in 1909, Alfred Deakin, one of his many political patrons, eulogised him in federal parliament as Australia’s national poet.20 Evans is a nineteenth-century imperial poet and his penchant for stirring the industrious spirit of the settler society through rhetorically grand invocations of the nation’s destiny is a marked feature of his work. In poems such as ‘Ode for Commonwealth Day’, ‘Australia’, ‘A Federal Song’ and ‘The Land of Dawning’ he imagines Australia as a young virgin of immense resources waiting for the industrious enterprise of the newly arrived British race. Evans, like Hodgson and Arrowsmith before him, used literary culture to justify Indigenous dispossession and promote colonial expansion.21 His books of poetry include The Repentance of Magdalene Despar and Other Poems (1891), Loraine and Other Verses (1898), The Secret Key and Other Verses (1906), and a memorial edition of the Collected Verse in 1928. As well as the civic celebrations of public men, national pioneers and state occasions, his oeuvre includes lyric celebrations of the natural environment, metaphysical speculations on standard Victorian themes such as love and duty and life and death, and a number of long romantic verse melodramas.22 Evans’s most frequently collected poems are ‘An Australian Symphony’ and ‘The Women of the West’.The former reflects on the distinctive melancholic character of Australian literature, while the latter pays a popular tribute to the pioneer women who brought civilisation to the frontier: For them no trumpet sounds the call, no poet plies his arts – They only hear the beating of their gallant loving hearts. But they have sung with silent lives the song all songs above – The holiness of sacrifice, the dignity of love.23 Both poems give a good indication of the character of his small but continuing national reputation. His lyric celebrations of local beauty and civic virtue have led to ongoing local recognition. Evans and Davis continue to serve as prominent local markers of the significant contribution Toowoomba has made to Australian literary culture; and the chief vehicles of these ongoing reputations for the last seventy years are the annual ‘pilgrimages’ in honour of the two writers, which continue to be held by the Toowoomba Ladies’ Literary Society.

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The Toowoomba Ladies’ Literary Society and the civic function of a literary past Founded in September 1913 by Lady Littleton Groom, the wife of the then federal member for the Darling Downs, Sir Littleton Ernest Groom, the Ladies’ Literary Society was originally conceived as a selfimprovement society for young women.24 Since then it has emerged as the most important custodian of Toowoomba’s literary heritage. The society was not responsible for the Essex Evans memorial that was built in Webb Park on the edge of the range in 1909 through public subscription, but since its inception it has established a plaque at the site of Essex Evans’s home and erected commemorative cairns, plaques and founts to ‘Steele Rudd’ (1950), the critic A. G. Stephens (1967), the poet, essayist, editor and long-time president of the society, Margaret Curran (1963), and the poet, story writer, editor and long-time vice-president, Alice Guerin Crist. It also established literary pilgrimages to the memorials for Essex Evans (from 1929) and ‘Steele Rudd’ (from 1950).25 A pilgrimage is a journey to a sacred place. The literary pilgrimage accordingly canonises the poet as a quasi-religious figure and establishes him or her as a source of moral, social, cultural and political authority.This shift in signification from religion to culture has its roots in the nineteenth century, and the Toowoomba Ladies’ Literary Society’s consecration of the poet has much in common with Thomas Carlyle’s influential veneration of the poet as a visionary hero.26 The 1918 editorial of the society’s only venture into print, The Lamp, sets out the relationship between the poet and the Ladies’ Literary Society, and that between the Society and the general citizenry of the region and the nation. The poet is represented as an inspired visionary who dispenses revelation to his or her less-inspired audience. This audience’s ability to recognise a literary revelation when they see one sets them apart from the general populace and authorises their missionary role in the wider dissemination of ‘the light . . . which has come to us through the great masters’.27 The Ladies’ Literary Society of Toowoomba received a great deal of support from the local newspaper, the Toowoomba Chronicle, which would publish the full text of the pilgrimage addresses for many years. Prominent civic figures such as politicians, teachers and businesspeople, many of them married to members of the Society, were also actively involved. In addition

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to the pilgrimages, the Society held monthly meetings where talks were given on a variety of literary topics. The programs from the 1920s to the 1980s included discussions of ‘Lady Macbeth’, ‘Poetry in its relation to life’, ‘Citizenship’, ‘Australian novelists’, ‘An introduction to modern literature’, ‘Russian literature before 1914’, ‘Shakespeare’s country’ and ‘Ballads of the people’. In the early years there were debates on issues such as ‘Do pictures tend to the improving of the ideals of a community’ and ‘Hero-Worship is beneficial to a Nation’, as well as an essay competition for members on ‘Notable Women’.28 The Society was also instrumental in the erection of a memorial cairn to Steele Rudd, which was opened in 1950 by Margaret Curran, who was president of the Ladies’ Literary Society for thirty years from 1933 to 1963. Literature and its associated characters, geographies and monuments comprise a kind of historical architecture that cultivates a civilised sensibility within the municipal space. Toowoomba is civilised by the monuments: they continually prompt the ‘careless passer by’ to rehearse a set of ethical values which they serve to evoke and concretise; and a proper respect and attention to literature fulfils much the same function. As the chief custodian of the literary culture of the city, the Ladies’ Literary Society was (and to some extent remains) an important part of the local imagination. The Society not only encouraged an informed appreciation and promotion of literature; a number of members over the years have also been active writers in professional contexts and through local writing groups. Curran and the long term vice-president, Alice Guerin Crist, both earned a living as professional writers and editors, and both, in their time, carried on Essex Evans’s work as public poets committed to active participation in the civic life of the city.29 Alice Guerin Crist immigrated with her family to Australia from Ireland at the age of two in 1878. Her father was a teacher and she spent her childhood in a number of small South-East Queensland rural schools. In 1896 she accepted an appointment of her own to the Blackall Range State School near Landsborough, but after a transfer to West Haldon the following year she was rather unfairly dismissed from service. Crist returned to her family at Douglas on the Darling Downs and in 1902 married a German immigrant farmer, Joseph Crist. The Crists moved to

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an isolated property at Rosenberg near Bundaberg in 1910, but returned to Toowooomba in 1913.30 Despite significant periods when she had to concentrate on farm work and the care of her children, Crist was able to pursue a remarkably active literary career. She was a prolific writer of verse and short fiction and published widely in Australian newspapers, including the Sydney Bulletin, the Worker and Steele Rudd’s Magazine. Crist’s devout Irish Catholicism was associated with democratic politics, and in 1902 she became a member of the Socialistic Democratic Vanguard. At about this time she became friendly with another poet and schoolteacher, Mary Gilmore, who published her work in the women’s page of the Worker. Crist tended to write about her rural and domestic experiences and frequently celebrated the natural beauty of the bush and the virtues and struggles of Irish-Australian pioneers.There is also a marked Celtic influence in several of her poems: in the theme of homesickness for Ireland, and in the sprites and faeries which populate the bottom of the garden in her nature poetry and verses for children. Crist’s youngest brother, Felician, was killed at Passchendaele in 1917, and she contributed Anzac Day poems to the Toowoomba Chronicle and other occasional verse for many years. From 1920 Crist made a determined effort to derive an income from her writing.The Catholic Advocate began to pay her for rural and religious poems and stories, and in 1927 she published her first collection of verse, When Rody Came to Ironbark and Other Verses.The Catholic publisher Pellegrini brought out a collection of her religious poems entitled Eucharist Lilies and Other Verses in 1929. From 1930, as editor of the Children’s Page of the Catholic Advocate, she used this useful and flexible instrument to stimulate the imaginations of Queensland’s Catholic children. Her page in the Advocate, like her verse, was an inventive mix of Catholic Irish-Australian nationalism, domestic virtue and environmental appreciation, and she encouraged correspondents. In 1935 she was awarded the King’s Jubilee Medal for her contribution to Australian literature and in 1936 she received a Commemoration Medal for the coronation of George VI. When Rody Came to Ironbark and Other Verses is a representative selection of Crist’s more secular work. ‘The Way of the Bush’ combines her

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religious sensibility and bush experience in a celebration of the ethical character of a pioneering community: A night of storm and wind and rain, Tall trees bowing beneath the blast That shakes and rattles the window-pane, And a thunderous roar as the creek goes past. Inside there are pictures and flowers and books, And a slim girl-wife with shingled hair; The lamplight glimmers on cosy nooks, And Desmond Keane in his easy chair Thanks God for home and the day’s toil o’er . . . It is not long before a neighbor in need comes to leave his children while he rushes to the hospital to comfort his ailing wife: ‘For this is the way of the bush . . . neighbourly service prompt at need’. Keane helps his neighbour through the storm to his wife, the children are well looked after by his own partner, and the entire community rallies around in support: Courage and patience and sturdy toil And kindness unstinted in others’ needs – How the God that made them must love them all! For the ‘way of the bush’ is His way indeed.31 Go It! Brothers! was dedicated to the work of the Christian Brothers of Australia. It was initially published serially in the Catholic Advocate and then issued as a novel in 1932. It is a series of idealised and moralistic accounts of the education of boys at St Mary’s School in Toowoomba. Regular sporting contests with their honourable rivals from the Grammar School provide opportunities for affirming Catholic ideology – for ‘Brother Moyland . . . had trained them perfectly not only in football but in all the ethics of manly sport . . .’32 Crist’s friend and colleague Margaret Curran was born at Colinton near Esk in 1887 and was educated at the Ipswich Convent. She worked

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as an editor and journalist for Steering Wheel, was a sub-editor for the Toowoomba Chronicle, and for forty-five years edited The Country Woman and Producer’s Review. In 1928 she published a small collection of poetry with Carter Watson in Brisbane, The Wind Blows High and Low and Other Verses. Her oeuvre is similar though much smaller than Crist’s and suggests a shared perception of the subjects and occasions suitable for a female poet. The Wind Blows High and Low and Other Verses includes a number of occasional poems in commemoration of Anzac Day, a tribute on the death of Henry Lawson, some nature lyrics, a number of Irish poems, some Catholic religious verse, and a few interesting poems on women and work. The work of balancing literary activity and domestic responsibility provides the occasion for ‘Buying Fish’. In this poem the narrator’s daughter interrupts her distracted mother’s literary work to send her along to the shop to buy some fish for lunch for her husband and son: Now you needn’t sigh like that, Or put a martyr-look in those dear eyes, Nor glance with longing at your half-done ‘pome.’ Men must be fed, though rhyme and scansion wait, And editors bereave themselves of hair, Waiting for copy.33 On the way the dreamy narrator is captivated by the natural beauty of Toowoomba and when she returns it is with a bunch of violets, copies of ‘Hazlitt on Shakespeare’ and ‘Zimmerman on Solitude’, but no fish. Curran’s poems on the domestic circumstances of her literary production are interesting for their glimpses of a woman’s writing career in a regional city. ‘Anzac Eve’, on the other hand, suggests the emotional consolation which the poet found in her personal involvement in the civic promotion of literature and an associated patriotic consciousness. The poem is set around Toowoomba’s striking monument to the local men who fell in the First World War, known locally as the Mothers’ Memorial: Just then the city lights shone out: Each name shone forth as brightest gold;

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A strange, sweet perfume played about And in my heart crept peace, untold . . . I felt . . . warm hands . . . upon my own . . . My son kept tryst . . . at the Grey Stone.34 The monument, the lights of the city, the evening perfume, patriotism and religious faith come together in an experience of place which consoles the mother for her loss and redeems the son’s sacrifice. ‘Anzac Eve’ provides a nice foil for the civic work undertaken by Curran during her long involvement with the Ladies’ Literary Society.

Local girls made good: the expatriate careers of two women writers The resident careers of Crist and Curran between the wars make interesting comparisons with the expatriate careers of two women prose writers who spent some of their youth in Toowoomba. Dorothy Cottrell and Margaret Trist spent most of their lives in metropolitan centres, but the Darling Downs continued to play an important role in their creative imaginations. Dorothy Cottrell was born Dorothy Wilkinson in Picton, New South Wales, in 1902. She contracted poliomyelitis at the age of five and spent the remainder of her life in a wheelchair. She grew up partly in Sydney, partly on South-West Queensland stations owned by her mother’s family, and also spent time with her grandmother in ‘Simla’, a large house on the eastern escarpment in Toowoomba. In 1922 she secretly married Walter Mackenzie Cottrell. After periods on Dunk Island the couple returned in 1924 to Cottrell’s uncle’s property, ‘Ularunda’, near Morven.35 It was here between 1924 and 1927 that Cottrell wrote her first novel, The Singing Gold, which was published in America by the Ladies Home Journal and then Houghton and Mifflin, followed by Hodder and Stoughton in Britain. Angus & Robertson did not publish an Australian edition until 1956. The Singing Gold is a loosely autobiographical Bildungsroman narrated in the first person by the heroine, Joan Whatmore. Joan is inspired by her intimate connections with the natural geography of South-West Queensland, and the plot of the novel follows some of the events in the author’s own life. In the novel, however, it is her husband’s death in Sydney that precipitates the heroine’s return to the family property where

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she gives birth to twins. The deaths of her husband, her mother and her dog in quick succession, and the ageing of her father, precipitate a crisis exacerbated by the difficulties experienced by a woman in running the family property. Joan is ultimately redeemed by her love for a childhood friend who returns from the war and subsequent adventures to complete the young family. Jerry shares Joan’s connection with the rural environment and their union is consecrated by a journey to the Gulf Country to hear the larks, ‘the singing gold’, often referred to in her father’s stories. ‘The Singing Gold’ is a principal motif of the novel and suggests the fragility of beauty and sensibility and its need for masculine protection.The narrator’s curiously whimsical, almost naive attitude to events robs many of the narrative’s tragic turns of their existential horror, and the conventional romantic ending would now fail to satisfy some audiences. The Singing Gold represents some interesting attitudes to Islanders, Aborigines and migrant servants. When Joan’s unmarried Aunt Austace visits in search of a violent husband who has deserted his wife, for example, the two characters are drawn into an argument that ends with Joan being dispatched to her grandmother’s house in Toowoomba, and an education deemed more appropriate to her class position. Aunt Austace is a religious hypocrite who uses her community work to bully people into compliance with her prescriptive code of morality. Her criticism of Aborigines and socialists, however, is not allowed to pass unchallenged by the spirited fourteen-year-old heroine:‘What right have you to condemn those who differ from your class-bound opinions? To assume that you speak with the voice of God? To . . . to . . . to go jamming nice comfortable little brown babies into ugly slips, just because you like them . . .’36 Dorothy Cottrell is an unfairly neglected writer who has probably suffered for the sin of expatriatism. Soon after writing The Singing Gold she moved to the United States, and in 1930 published a second novel under the title of Tharlane in the United States and Earth Battle in Britain (discussed in Part 3 of this book by Robyn Trotter and Belinda McKay). Cottrell then worked to break into journalism and she published stories and articles on Australian, American and Caribbean topics in British and American journals such as Liberty, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1934 she published a small book, Winks: His Book, about the adventures of a small terrier, and followed this up in

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1936 with Wilderness Orphan, another children’s story about the ‘life and adventures of Chut the kangaroo’. Wilderness Orphan later formed the basis for Ken Hall’s film Orphan of the Wilderness, which was also shown in Britain and the United States. In 1954 Cottrell published The Silent Reefs, an adventure mystery novel set in the Caribbean. Margaret Trist was born Margaret Beth Lucas in Dalby on 27 November 1914, and was educated at a small convent school there. On leaving school she moved to Sydney where she married Frank Trist at the age of nineteen. Trist spent most of the remainder of her life in Sydney, apart from a small period in the early years of the war when she and her husband lived in Blaxland in the Blue Mountains. Despite publishing all of her literary work while in Sydney, she deserves to be included in any account of Darling Downs writing. The key to many of the characters of her novels and short stories is often to be found in their rural past, and Trist makes frequent use of her own upbringing in Dalby. Her first two collections of short stories, In the Sun (1943) and What Else Is There (1946), were appreciated for their ‘quiet strength and serenity’, but her concentration on ‘ordinary people in ordinary places and situations on the land’ was seen as limiting.37 ‘She shows the minds of her characters cleverly’ but ‘they are very often minds which are mediocre and indistinguishable from dozens of other minds’.38 The recurrent theme in Trist’s fiction is a bittersweet experience of local place. The local provides a community that can offer a sense of belonging, particularly to older people, but the familiar codes of accepted behaviour and vocation that come with it tend to stifle those who yearn for a more satisfying life in keeping with the deep instinctive drives and urges of the human psyche. Trist’s first novel, Now that We’re Laughing (1945), is set in the Blue Mountains and uses a romantic triangle to examine the class structure and moral codes of a small provincial community. Jimmy Blair, the only child in the most well-to-do family in Upper Glen, is on leave from the RAAF. He spends most of the narrative trying to seduce Sheila Carlingford, a modest lower-middle-class girl from a respectable but unpretentious family. Jimmy is more interested in sex than a relationship, and yet he prefers Sheila’s feminine restraint to the sexually interested Joyce Henderson, who belongs to a sprawling lower-class family of sexually active girls. Trist explores the

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tensions between an instinctive sexual desire and the repressive expectations of the moral classes, and these tensions are interestingly inflected by the different social expectations associated with gendered identities. The interest in sex and marriage continues in Daddy (1947), whose pathetic hero, Robert Lloyd, is a minor poet and littérateur with bohemian ambitions, who has clandestine affairs while his naïve but good-natured wife looks after their home in the northern suburbs of Sydney. Trist’s narrative tone is light, humorous and uncensorious and she derives her social comedy from the incompatibilities between respectable moral codes, sexual desire and human fulfilment. Morning in Queensland (1958), Trist’s last novel, is considered her best. In it she returns to her own childhood on the black soil plains of the Darling Downs in the years between the wars. The novel is a Bildungsroman that deals with the growth from infancy to adolescence of Tansy. Tansy’s early experience of landscape and the rich characters of her extended family are fulfilling, but as she matures she discovers a family history of conflict and acrimony, which she associates with the oppressive conformism of a small Darling Downs community. In the conclusion to the novel the heroine leaves her mother and sister behind and boards a train to Sydney: Soon, behind her lay her own town, Meredith and Marny alone in the small house on Palm-grove Street. Behind lay Land’s End, where the walls still whispered old stories to those who wished to hear. Behind lay Granny and Grand-dad and the Sawpit Tree. Behind lay Grandfather, sleeping peacefully in the grave from which one could see the blue line of hills, and over which blew the free wind from the plain. Behind lay her childhood . . . From now on she would cross any border which she wanted to cross.39

Authentic individuals and parochial communities: three postwar expatriate poets The lure of an authentic identity associated with a childhood experience of a local place, and the corresponding threat of the narrow-minded parochialism that comes from a static culture, continue as themes in

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postwar poetry. David Rowbotham develops a clearly affirming interest in the numinous potential of a local life within a regional landscape and community in his early volumes of verse. Born into a family of bootmakers in Toowoomba in 1924, he attended Toowoomba Grammar, worked as a clerk in the Toowoomba foundry, won a teacher’s scholarship which took him to Brisbane, and then taught in western Queensland. He served as a wireless operator in the RAAF during the war and then spent some time working on the land. He studied at the University of Queensland, where he won the Ford Memorial Medal for poetry, and later at Sydney University, where he picked up the Henry Lawson prize for poetry. After a trip to Europe in 1951 he returned to Toowoomba and a journalist’s position on the Toowoomba Chronicle. From 1955 to 1964 he worked for Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, and after five not especially happy years as a senior tutor in the University of Queensland English Department, he returned to the Courier-Mail in 1969 as chief literary and theatre critic. In 1980 he became literary editor, a post he held until his retirement. Rowbotham’s poetry appeared in newspapers from the mid-1940s, and in the early 1950s Douglas Stewart published his work in the Red Page of the Bulletin. He was also represented in Angus & Robertson’s Australian Poetry (1953), George Mackaness’s Poets of Australia and several of the ‘Jindyworobak’ anthologies. His first collection, Ploughman and Poet, appeared in 1954, and several further collections followed, including Inland (1958), All the Room (1964), Bungalow and Hurricane (1967), The Makers of the Ark (1970), The Pen of Feathers (1971), Selected Poems (1975) and Maydays (1980). He also published a collection of prose sketches and short stories, Town and City (1956), and a novel, The Man in the Jungle (1964). Ploughman and Poet is a series of lyrics that explore the relationship between the settler farmer (the poet) and his adopted geography. The title comes from the final stanza of the opening poem, ‘For the Darling Downs’: O territory of dreams, O love that is old, Ploughman and poet share your heart of gold In winsome flashes only; but with hopes and fears Both draw seeking furrows down the years.40

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A number of the poems seek, almost Les Murray–like, to represent the complex, troubled and yet numinous intimacy that characterises localised settler cultures and their rural geographies, as in ‘Old Peter’ for example: When cattle in the casual hills call dumbly Through the trees and with awkward shuffles humbly seek The valley in the afternoon, he counts Their silhouettes against the gully twilights, Follows them along the track and sees Them through the sliprails; with a captured gesture Of brown hands slaps them into clicking bails And talks of bitter seasons he remembers, Of death and dust, of sharp bone breaking the hide, And crows encircling desolation. Beyond These silky-oaks he built his first defence Against a wilderness, and deigned to stay; Mastered his span of earth in a way and rode The hills till the land gave up its secrets, harshly, And the farm was won.41 In poems such as ‘Hometown’, ‘The Farmer’s Wife’ and ‘Kitchen’, Rowbotham explores the spiritual associations of quotidian, domestic and local cultural practices. In ‘The Farmer’s Wife’ he writes: ‘I will never make a poem / As the farmer’s wife made tea’. The making of the tea is both a simple domestic ritual and a social function and it is the poet’s consciousness of this local artefact which reveals his poetic sensibility: I shall never set soft magic In my moment, like this wife; From the farmland cup she gave me I drank all time and life.42 Singing the local place affirms the subject’s intimate connections with a ‘natural’ cultural order, and this represents the full presence of an authentic identity that offers spiritual fulfilment as a compensation for mortality. And yet the desire for a full natural presence itself signifies a characteristic

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sense of alienation.This note of ‘desolation’, as John Strugnell has pointed out, is subtly present in a number of poems that deal with the themes of change, experience and the passing of a traditional way of life.43 Toowoomba and the Darling Downs seem to operate as the spirit-place that grounds a poet who must now sally out and meet a wider world: Dogs thrive, and boyhood’s school needs painted rooms, And small-town culture fashionably booms When tenors or pianists challenge provincial ways And step from Progress into stand-still days. Oh, somebody keep this hometown not unchanging But ever memorable, that when the heart is ranging Beyond its citizenship and the old-pensioners, The droll and the dear may make eminent the years.44 David Malouf describes Rowbotham’s early work as ‘subject poetry’, that is, poetry which describes a particular subject such as ‘birds, plants, trees, animals . . . or landscape’, as distinct from poetry that dramatises the first person pronoun.45 Such self-dramatising poetry is, according to Malouf, characteristic of a transformation in the Australian poetic tradition from around the late 1960s.This transformation significantly influenced Rowbotham’s later work. His second volume, Inland, makes more explicit use of landscape as a metaphor for the poet’s interiority. Rowbotham left the Toowoomba Chronicle for the Brisbane Courier-Mail in 1956 and his third volume, All the Room, is much more concerned with the alienating effects of the modern world. It is indicative of the tensions between the metropolitan and the local that the interest in a localised cultural geography which marks the early work is gradually superseded by an increasing interest in the vocation of poetry.46 Rowbotham’s transition from a regional city to a capital city is reversed by Bruce Dawe’s movement from Melbourne to Toowoomba. Dawe was born in Geelong on 15 February 1930, left school at sixteen, and after a series of odd jobs returned to night school to matriculate. He received a teaching scholarship and attended Melbourne University for a year, during which he met a number of emerging Victorian poets

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and converted to Catholicism. After failing the end-of-year exams, he returned to odd jobs and worked for some time as a postman. In 1959 he joined the RAAF and four years later was posted to Harristown, Toowoomba, where he met his wife, Gloria. By this time Dawe had already published his first book of poems, No Fixed Address (1962).47 In 1968, after a brief stint in Malaysia and then Melbourne, he resigned from the RAAF and returned to Toowoomba, where he lived until moving to Caloundra in 2000. Initially he held a teaching appointment at Downlands College, but by 1972 he had been appointed to a lectureship in English at the then Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (now the University of Southern Queensland), the institution that nominated him as an Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 1993. Dawe’s formative influences are not, like Rowbotham’s, the suggestive geographies of the Darling Downs. Dawe adapted a number of the themes and strategies of the New American Poetry in turning to vernacular idioms to represent the perplexities of everyday life for ordinary Australians.48 He was also heavily influenced by Catholic anticommunism, and the abuse of power and language is a frequent target of his satirical verse. Dawe often adopts the mantle of a public poet, passing comment on topical events within the public sphere. Unlike Essex Evans, however, his public poetry is more often than not a protest against the expediency and hypocrisy of institutions and their public representatives. A strong social conscience and a related interest in the spiritual potential of ordinary suburban life are hallmarks of his work. As an itinerant who ultimately found home and family in a regional culture Dawe is an interesting figure to examine in a regional history.The importance of location to a fulfilling family life is implicit in ‘Drifters’, a poem inspired by the poet’s itinerant childhood: One day soon he’ll tell her it’s time to start packing, And the kids will yell ‘Truly?’ and get wildly excited for no reason, And the brown kelpie pup will start dashing about, tripping everyone up, And she’ll go out to the vegetable-patch and pick all the green tomatoes from the vines, And notice how the oldest girl is close to tears . . .49

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And yet he is wary of the narrow parochialism and insularity of a torpid stay-at-home culture.The stasis that characterises the city of Toowoomba held some appeal for a nostalgic Rowbotham, but for Dawe it represents a complacent regionalism: You can smell the peace up here. The proportion, the narrowness. Traitor, traitor whines the piano-wire voice As you swing past the Welcome sign To find nothing is changed . . . This is a city which is all present: It moves, but oh so slowly You would have to sleep years, Waking suddenly once in a decade To surprise it in the act of change. Saturday night, in the main street kerb, The angle-parked cars are full of watchers, their feet on invisible accelerators, Going nowhere, fast.50 The ambivalent character of the regional city is imagined in another poem through ruminations on a recognisably Toowoomban experience of fog. The thick blanket that regularly blurs the mountain city is an excuse to snuggle up close with self and family in a cosy appreciation of domestic security. Yet as the fog lifts, it prompts ‘wonder / about the farther view’. For some ‘the fog is not our comfort’ and ‘what it conceals, now shambling / forward into our snug history / will prove on closer acquaintance not to have/our welfare . . . at heart at all’.51 The local fog metaphor can be read facetiously as a prophetic allusion to the controversial policies and pronouncements of Queensland premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who seemed to personify the pernicious effects of regional parochialism for Dawe during the 1970s. ‘The Vision Splendid’ is a satiric monologue in which the self-righteous

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politician surveys his state from the vantage of the parliamentary annex: the city smokes like a plain, mica-points of late sunlight run glittering like sparks in the stubble O Jerusalem, Jerusalem I have been firm and just as these things are understood in the assembly, crushing the ungodly . . .52 Self-righteous religious dogmatism and an associated social and political complacency are characteristic of Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland in general and of the range city of Toowoomba in particular.The theme is taken up again in ‘On Bad Days’ with a telling note of personal exasperation and a wry conclusive switchback on the Christian fundamentalists. The small town paper, the small crowd that turns up to a civil liberties protest and the epidemic of charismatic churches are all indicative of the ‘totalitarianism of the banal’, ‘the condominium of the crackpot’, ‘the averted gaze’ and ‘the resolutely buried head’ which characterise this ‘small city’ in which the poet has ‘been chosen / to spend what is laughingly called my life’. The poem concludes with an ironic word from Christ, which makes a nice riposte to those settlers who imagined the place as God’s country: ‘I go to church, and a cramped Saviour / winces on His cross, saying, When I first came here, / I admit, I was hopeful, too . . .’53 Dawe’s adopted city nevertheless remains capable of feeding his interest in the numinous possibilities of the urban moment. In ‘Today’, for example, a day spent visiting the prize gardens during Toowoomba’s famous Carnival of Flowers prompts the realisation that the present might offer a fulfilling moment as rich as any that might lie in a far-off future.54 Dawe clearly missed the less-ordered working-class suburbs of Melbourne from which he drew the inspiration for many of his earlier poems, and this sense of nostalgia for the great metropolis is not quite put to rest by a whimsical poem, ‘The Affair’. The poet’s feelings for the Victorian capital are explored through the metaphor of a failed fling with an older woman: ‘Twelve years down the line, / what’s left of our love? Very little. Only in dreams / do I wake up and say: “I can afford you now! / I’m on my way! I’m on my way!”55 (Lest it be thought that

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such a poem indicates that perhaps the mountain city was growing on the expatriate Victorian, it is best to keep in mind that, while ‘The Affair’ was cut from the next edition of Sometimes Gladness, ‘On Bad Days’ and ‘Provincial City’ were retained.) The poetry of Jean Kent also remembers the Darling Downs as the intriguing landscape of childhood; but in evoking it she also reveals something of its gendered character. Kent was born at Chinchilla in 1951 and educated at the Glennie Memorial School in Toowoomba in the mid- to late 1960s. She spent her youth in and around the Darling Downs before taking a degree in psychology from the University of Queensland and moving further afield. Like Dawe, Kent likes to use domestic metaphors to suggest the paradoxes and significance of ordinary human life. She might also be compared with Rowbotham, however, for her tendency to revisit the familial relationships of her youth in association with a richly remembered experience of vernacular architecture and local geography. After describing her father’s characteristic location on the verandah of the family home, for example, she later broadens the significance of the house into a more general metaphor for the laconic subjectivities of rural people: This is the country Where feelings stay unspoken. In the home paddock of the head, Harvesting is private. Between the ripening Thoughts and the reality of speech, there is always this silence this space between warzones bordering us as the verandah boards the deep space between the heart of the house and the world.56 The Darling Downs is a place frequently recollected in Kent’s poetry. It functions as a linguistic, symbolic, historical and geographical location with which the poet attempts to imagine the limits and potentialities of subjectivity. Sometimes the region is recollected through the memories

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of early childhood as a comfortable but limited world that has the potential to somehow confine personal development. In ‘From the Bottom of the Range, the View’ the poet recalls climbing to the top of the Moreton Bay fig trees where she could imagine herself as an explorer in quest of a view beyond the horizon: ‘“How far can you see?” the children ask, “How far?” / But always the mountain was in the way. The Great Divide.’The scene shifts to the property of her grandparents on the other side of the range, but the question remains the same: (How far can you see? How far?) But always . . . the same smalltown reply: I can see Toowoomba. I can see the Range. And here on the other side of the creek in 1963 Old Jack behind a draughthorse is ploughing a paddock for potatoes.57 When the poet remembers adolescence and school in Toowoomba, it is to recall the impulse to escape in search of wider horizons and the fulfilment of her adult potential. ‘In a Provincial City, Cycling to School’ shows an appreciation of Dawe’s ‘Two Ways of Considering Fog’: Cycling to school, I disappear in fog. My home vanishes behind me, rapt in a monstrous hug. I grow old passing houses where children I knew once are leaving now for jobs. The children go to the unrewarding jobs typical of small towns: jobs in the foundry, where David Rowbotham worked for a time as a frustrated clerk, or jobs ‘selling shoes in Pigotts’.When the cyclist passes the ‘house of the girls / whose mother died’ the fog becomes ‘shrouds of white’ to which the city now summons them. The cyclist is brought ‘back to earth’ by her arrival at school and this prompts a summative statement grounded once again by a geographical image and the concluding line of Dawe’s ‘Provincial City’:

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Down the length of this country like a zip Connecting inland to coast, mountains lie – And we are locked in the neat teeth, in this city Going nowhere, fast. As the morning rises I walk, weighted, through my dreams of leaving. White fog slowly unwraps.58 As with the verse of Dawe, however, it is Kent’s facility for revealing ‘the spiritual and regenerative qualities that infuse everyday objects and experiences’ that enable her to discern the recuperative powers of an identity grounded in a regional geography.59 In ‘A Dream of Refuge’, for example, the ‘grandparents’ house floats like a ferry’ which draws the poet, a ‘tired board rider’, to ‘broad, dry decks’. The poet’s experience of her grandparents’ house is mediated by memories of ‘my family in gentle battle’ and the consoling effects of the familial emplacement in a house set in its landscape exists in a suggestive tension with the realisation that refuge is not a long-term proposition, and sentimental nostalgia can erase the struggles that are a part of every local history. The verandah returns as a liminal motif that holds the pros and cons of located-ness in a productive, even numinous, tension: On distant mirages, my grandparents’ house Floats. It appears beside me While I’m balancing oddly, Teetering between turns in my life. Beyond a window, its bottom tier hitched Like a skirt at a beach, this verandah waits. Pretending no absence, resting on this reef, Will I find at last my life floating out Like a dream just this side of sleeping? Here between the house and the world: A space, stripped, open to air A room, rippled above and below A home like a safe, dry hollow in the heart Of an ocean. Here even the peripatetic moon

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Pauses. On this lingering ledge of light I wait, believing the tide will turn.60

Conclusion A snapshot of the contemporary writing scene in Toowoomba and on the Darling Downs would reveal some significant established expatriate Toowoomban writers, a few well-published local writers active in different forms and styles, and a number of amateur or semi-professional writers often associated with one of a number of important literary societies or writers’ groups. These writers’ groups and societies frequently run developmental workshops and promotional activities and regularly publish local anthologies, such as Downs Voices and Voices of the Downs, often with state government support. The journal of rural arts, Coppertales, produced annually by the University of Southern Queensland, also regularly features local writers and critical studies of works from the past. One only has to look at J. L. Blyth and P. T. McNally’s bibliography of Darling Downs writing to see that these different and yet communicating levels of literary activity have been an historical feature of the region since the late 1800s. The importance of rural culture to the development of the colonial enterprise once enabled the writing of the Darling Downs to be seen as central to a national culture. If there is now a temptation to downplay the significance of regional literary culture, it is salutary to remember that even today two of the more promising young Queensland writers have their roots, or still live and work, in the Darling Downs. Andrew McGahan grew up in Dalby before venturing to the Big Smoke in search of a vocation. The initial reception of Praise (1992) made much of his rural beginnings, before perspectives on his work were swamped by the urban grunge phenomenon. More recently, McGahan has returned to his origins in The White Earth, which was published in 2004 and is therefore outside the time frame of this literary history. A winner of the Miles Franklin award, The White Earth is now the single most important literary work about the region, and draws extensively on the work of historian Maurice French, professor of history at the University of Southern Queensland.61 Jillian Watkinson, who works in a drop-in centre in central Toowoomba, won the Queensland Premier’s Prize for an

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emerging Queensland writer. Watkinson’s novel The Architect (2000) is a self-consciously cosmopolitan narrative but, like the work of McGahan and indeed many of the writers of or from the Downs, it returns to rural Australia in search of a key to the personal mysteries that obsess the metropolis.62

PART 2: Central Queensland

(Re)Writing Traditions: The Bush Ethos in Central Queensland Writing Denis Cryle Thea Astley aptly summed up a sense of Central Queensland’s regional distinctiveness when she remarked that the ‘real Australia doesn’t begin until you are north of Rockhampton’.1 This chapter examines Central Queensland writing since the nineteenth century, and argues that it has been shaped primarily by the enduring influence of the bush ethos. While much of this legacy appears conventional and imitative, deriving in part from the city bushmen of the Sydney Bulletin, it has also provided writers with a starting point for a more original exploration of local and regional identities, especially in recent decades. Indeed, the regional preoccupation with the land and mateship both precedes and extends beyond the period of Bulletin influence from the 1890s to the Second World War. Rather than assuming that the ‘bush ethos’ constitutes a monolithic set of literary conventions, this chapter seeks to identify different strands, pastoral and proletarian, that enjoyed influence at different periods. Finally, this analysis constitutes a reassessment and revision of the national legend through the lens of contemporary regional writing from Central Queensland.

Early ballads and balladeers Unlike their Brisbane and Ipswich counterparts, Central Queensland writers were not prominent in the early pantheon of local Queensland talent. Nevertheless, the Stable and Kirwood collection of 1924 did

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feature a number of early poets with a connection to Central Queensland. Among them was the schoolmaster George Vowles (1846–1928), whose Sunbeams in Queensland (1870) was dedicated to Queensland’s second governor, Samuel Blackall.2 Vowles’s contemporary, Alexander Forbes (the pen-name of William Anderson Forbes, 1839–79), whom Stable considered ‘a real poet’, drew extensively on Central Queensland for inspiration, notably during his sojourn at the Cawarral goldfield.3 His ironic poem, ‘State of Queensland’, written in 1867, provides a counterpoint to official eulogies of the day: Oh, vaunted Queensland! on thy hungry shores, Which thou hast agents paid, at home to praise, Poor houseless vagrants rove about in scores, And spend in wretched penury their days; Eager to work, they can’t obtain a job, Compelled through want of food, the shepherds’ huts to rob. Forbes concludes that ‘surely Queensland’s emigration scheme, / Exceeds the foulest plot kidnapper e’er could dream’.4 Forbes’s poetry, however, is not all ironic. His subjects also include a shepherd’s homesickness for his native land, life on the Morinish goldfield north-west of Rockhampton, the death of a miner in a mineshaft, and a miner lost in the bush. If ‘Alick the Poet’ (Alexander Forbes) remains the most remarkable early exponent of bush literature in early Central Queensland, he was by no means its only representative. Ten years before Forbes wrote of the Morinish mineshaft accident in ‘The Digger’s Grave’, George Loyau in the Wide Bay district recorded the death of fellow shepherds in ‘Lines written on the hearing of the death of Martin O’Brien and G. Blair at the Dawson River 1858’.5 An itinerant poet and journalist who came to the Wide Bay district to work as a shepherd, Loyau (1835–98) regarded Central Queensland as a place of opportunity, albeit a dangerous frontier. His poems of the 1850s and 1860s, most of which remain unpublished, paint an austere picture of isolation, physical and spiritual.6 While Burns and Byron remained influential models for colonial versifiers, the pattern of grafting Australian lyrics and themes onto European cultural forms was well established in the colonies by the early years of

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white settlement in Central Queensland.The popular appeal of local ballads depended as much on their currency as on their composition. Racial conflict underpins a number of these early local compositions, especially in the wake of the massacre of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank station in 1857. Loyau’s 1858 poem dedicated to his shepherd companions alludes to events on the Dawson: Again the news come on the ear ‘The shepherds have been slain’ Arm! Arm! To drive the savages O’er mountain hill or plain. Three months have hardly glided past Since the rude shock came Upon a family kind and true The Fraziers [sic] was their name.7 A decade later, however,Vowles calls for religion rather than the rifle in his ‘A Murder in the Bush’, while in ‘Soliloquy of an Aborigine’ he puts a counterview to Loyau’s: White man, sleep on! Moons will awake and go, But you will rise not. In a day to come, When insects will have battened on your flesh, Your bones will glisten in the sunshine. Then, Discovered in the lapse of time, they will, Lamented by a nation, find a grave: The black man will be branded with disgrace; A human bull-dog will be sent to hunt him, And a whole tribe shot for the guilty one.8 Among the most publicised ballads of the early period was Forbes’s ‘Death of Halligan’, based on an 1869 incident in which a gold-buyer was ambushed and killed between Rockhampton and Morinish: With crimsoned hands the felons clutched The wages of their guilt;

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Great heaven, to think, for such a lure, His blood they foully spilt, With blanching cheeks and trembling hearts, They anxious peered around, Then took their ghastly burden up, And left the fatal ground. The call for retribution at the end of the poem echoes and reinforces local and press opinion: Now, search ye sharp detectives! Hunt blood hounds of the law! And from their sanguinary lairs These foul assassins draw; And may their dreadful punishment To all the world proclaim, That Queensland’s justice will avenge Such deeds of blood and shame.9 Neither Loyau, the most prolific bush poet of the early period, nor Forbes extols bushranging or the underdog. Rather, they use popular forms to uphold order and authority in frontier conditions. Yet early writing on the stark frontier also retains elements of humour. Unable to fortify themselves with the consolations of mateship, shepherds and miners alike resort to patent medicines for relief, the best known of which was Holloway’s Pills. On their alleged effectiveness, however, literary opinion remains divided. A sceptical Loyau quips: Oh no! to extol thy wondrous fame I’d raise a monument to thy name And when the sculptor’s task is done Inscribe the word ‘Humbug’ thereon.10 Forbes, noting the propensity for alcohol and tobacco among his fellows, joins the debate on the merits of ‘Professor Holloway’:

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In Queensland here, his drugs are much esteemed, A certain balm for all diseases deemed. The ‘folks at home’ in London, however, look back On this great man, and brand him as a quack; Deride his ointment, laugh to scorn his bills, His puffs won’t swallow, nor of course his pills. ‘Gigantic humbug’, ‘swindler’, people say, In fact they’ve dubbed him ‘Doctor Gullaway’. In mock defence, Forbes adds: When, by stern death, at length we’re forced to lose him, May he get safely into Abram’s bosom; There in Elysium he will dwell retired, Where neither pills, nor ointment is required, For surely he to Heaven deserves to go, Who cured so many in this world below. Before his glory others’ fame grows dim, And Galen’s mighty self was but a quack to him.11 Echoes of frontier policy and violence continue well into twentiethcentury writing. In Git Away Back (1983), Merv Lilley, an important local writer and collector of Australian verse, reproduces an anonymous piece recounting the murder of the manager of Carnarvon station by the Kenniff bushranging brothers at the turn of the century.12 ‘The Breelong Blacks’ in the same collection explicitly invokes the spectre of frontier violence. Based on an incident at Gilgandra in New South Wales, this early poem revives the horrors of Hornet Bank with details of the slaughter of white women and children.13 Peter Coughran employs similar techniques in his twentieth-century collection of regional ballads. His ‘Gertrude’s Grave’, for example, evokes the last moments and bush burial of a young mother who dies giving birth in the Bunya Mountains. The sentimental and sensationalist techniques of the ballad,

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fusing folklore with history, are also used to good effect in Coughran’s lead poem, ‘The Wreck of the Rockhampton Mail’, which recounts the grim details and aftermath of a Traveston derailment near Gympie. Once again, the focus is as much on the ‘badly battered form’ of the hapless female victim and her children as it is on the rescue operation and its aftermath.14 Significantly, from the 1970s onwards both black and white writers who tackle the theme of frontier violence employ forms other than the ballad, including oral reminiscence and the novel.

Station literature and early women writers The bush ballad is an abbreviated relative of station literature, in so far as each depicts the trials and tribulations of early pastoral settlement in Central Queensland. But while the ballad remains a masculine form that celebrates action and danger, station accounts in Central Queensland are largely the work of educated women, in the form of extended diaries, autobiographies or novels. Consequently, station writing tends to be more representative of women’s survival in conditions of isolation and deprivation than traditional verse is. In her well-known letters, Rachel Henning, who took up property with her brother Biddulph north of Rockhampton in the 1860s, gives a graphic description of station life, including visits by shearers and overlanders.15 Henning’s record of her reading and social life confirms the culture of early station life as essentially British and disdainful of colonial achievement. Rosa Praed too began writing in the 1860s, while living on her family’s station in the Upper Logan. In 1901, after achieving fame for novels drawing on the ‘romance’ of the Australian bush, Praed observed wryly that her youthful works were ‘about countries I had never seen, about emotions of which I had absolutely no experience’: . . . it never struck me that my worthiest ambition might be to become a genuine Australian story-writer! Then it was rather the fashion to despise native surroundings and the romance of the bush. We all wanted to be English; to seek art beyond the sea, so some of us left the treasure behind and sailed after the shadow.16

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Praed spent two formative periods in Central Queensland. As a very young child she lived at Naraigin (also known as Hawkwood) station in the Burnett district, next door to Hornet Bank station. In 1872, as a newly-wed, Praed moved with her husband to isolated, mosquitoinfested Curtis Island near Gladstone. She repeatedly revisited Naraigin and frontier violence in both fiction and non-fiction, while Curtis Island provides the setting for three novels: An Australian Heroine (1880), The Romance of a Station (1889) and Sister Sorrow (1916). In Praed’s own life, the romance of the bush ended with her return to Brisbane in 1875 and subsequent departure for London the following year. Notwithstanding the resilience and humour displayed in her memoirs and fictional works, Praed concurred with Henry Lawson’s observation that bush life was ‘no place for a woman’.17 Her daily trials with centipedes and scorpions at Naraigin, and mosquitoes on Curtis Island, are echoed elsewhere in the comic disenchantment of Queensland overlander and poet, Philip Durham Lorimer (1843–97): Queensland! thou art a land of pest: From flies and fleas we ne’er can rest, E’en now mosquitoes round me revel; In fact they are the very devil. Sand flies and hornets just as bad, They nearly drive a fellow mad.18 For early settlers, the coastal settlements offered little social or cultural respite. Rachel Henning, arriving in 1862, tired of Rockhampton after two days and was keen to press on. Praed’s Lady Bridget is equally disdainful of ‘these cursed coastal townships’ and longs for the freedoms of station life.19 Judith Wright’s evocation of early Central Queensland pastoral settlement in The Generations of Men paints an unsavoury picture of early life in Rockhampton. Flooding which almost ‘drowned the town’ in summer brought mosquitoes ‘in clouds’, while visiting bush workers fought one another ‘in drunken joy outside the grog shops’.20 If station conditions were often harsh and memories of the Hornet Bank massacre lingered, there were nevertheless moments of improvised

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amusement.The old Dawson River prospector in The Generations of Men provides entertainment in the form of: . . . the obscener ditties of the goldfields, songs from Hawaii and the Islands, songs from Italian opera and German lieder and Schubert . . . He danced the can-can and the hula and wilder dances from South America, and they accompanied him on jew’s harps, tin whistles and improvised drums.21 Nicknamed ‘the Madman’, Wright’s fictional character is reminiscent of George Loyau’s ‘Professor Jacobs’, the down-at-heel travelling entertainer whom he befriends in the Queensland bush. In this context, the isolation and improvisation of bush life work to break down accepted social and cultural distinctions between high and popular culture, while in the townships climatic extremes diminish or vitiate cultural achievements. William Archer’s recollection of a Rockhampton music concert during a tropical downpour on the iron roof sets the regional cultural experience apart in its contradictions and impermanence.22 Paradoxically, retreat from the austerities of regional and early rural living encouraged in turn a cult of literary nostalgia that intensifies by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Praed, writing from London, includes many rural Australian settings and characters in her novels. Lala Fisher (1872-1929), the daughter of the Rockhampton district surveyor, married an Englishman and moved to London in the 1890s where she too wrote passionately about the landscapes of her youth. Here, in the title poem of her first published collection of poems, A Twilight Teaching (1898), she recalls the flowering shrubs and trees of her tropical home: Here golden wattle trembles in the light, Delicate and soft-floating to the sight. The scent of eucalyptus fills the air And throws throughout the bush its fragrance rare. The rich Bauhinia blushes in the sun, Twin-leaved and beautiful; but there is one,

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The ti-tree blossom, dearer far than all – It sheds its sweets at every breeze’s call.23 A brilliant, energetic and multi-talented young woman, Fisher edited, while still resident in London, a popular collection of her own and others’ expatriate writings on Australia, By Creek and Gully (1899), which included stories, poems and sketches by the Patchett Martins, Douglas Sladen and others of note. In her introductory piece, ‘To the StoryMakers’, Fisher nostalgically recalls the bush scenes ‘loved so well’, and reflects on the power of literature to evoke them: A magic power indeed ye hold Who wield the sweet, enchanted pen; To more old hearts than could be told Thou bringest back life’s youth again!24 Upon her return to Australia a few years later, Fisher lived first in Charters Towers, and later Sydney, where she published two shorter volumes of poems, Grass Flowering (1915) and Earth Spiritual (1918), of a more spiritual cast.25 The pervasive, emotional sense of exile from ‘my native land’ which is evident in Fisher’s early publications was to reappear, some thirty years on, in Noreen Neville’s ‘Aramac Station’, in which Neville evokes the past graciousness of country living at a time when its ‘long-used possessions’ are being put up for auction.26 Such is the persistence of this theme that Elsie MacDonald’s ‘Jericho’, Mercedes Birkbeck’s ‘Old Glenmore’27 and Rick Farley’s ‘Drought’28 continued to evoke these sentiments in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast to her poetry, the short stories in Fisher’s expatriate collection reflect the ironies of bush life. Mrs Patchett Martin’s ‘Cross Currents’, for example, explores the unhappiness of marriage in rural Queensland. Fisher’s own prose contribution, ‘His Luck’, imparts to the lost-in-thebush theme a macabre twist when an unfortunate station visitor spends a stormy night in a leper’s hut.29 Still more sombre is Fisher’s ‘The Sleeping Sickness of Lui the Kanaka’, which recounts in the first person a scene of intimidation by an overseer bent on ‘curing’ a superstitious worker:

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. . . I brought the whip heavily round his flanks . . . Round and round that bullock yard I lashed him – lashed his Crimean shirt to ribbons – lashed great weals upon his chest and shoulders and across his arms, until at length my arm refused further service, and fell helpless at my side. . . . ‘You get well, Lui’ I panted, ‘or I’m damned if I don’t do it again.’30 The shock value of the story, written for an expatriate readership as well as a local reading public, anticipates the exploration of white colonialism by local writers many decades later.

The influence of the Sydney Bulletin Fisher’s dramatic short story resembles in certain respects the style of Sydney Bulletin writers, not least in its explicit racism. For if regional writing in the mould of Loyau and Forbes helped to shape the ethos of the Bulletin, the ‘Bushman’s Bible’ was in turn widely read and recited throughout Central Queensland. While the tradition of the bush ballad was pre-eminently an oral one in the late nineteenth century, the literary influence of the Bulletin was clearly evident in Central Queensland by the 1930s. Processes of cross-fertilisation were complex. In particular, the collection and preservation policies of institutions like the Rockhampton School of Arts and the memoirs of individual journalists encouraged an ongoing dialogue between regional aspirants and national writing. After the Second World War, Paterson, Lawson and Rudd continued to inspire local imitators in prose and verse. At the same time, Lex McLennan, Esme Gollschewsky, Charlie Marshall and Merv Lilley, to name but a few, are each significant Central Queensland authors of the period who, by providing regional inflections of place, language and style, did more than merely imitate national trends. Such is the influence of nationalist traditions on Central Queensland writing that Paterson and his work are frequently invoked in contemporary as well as historical work. Peter James, for example, in a nostalgic 1982 short story about Mount Myles, speculates about the role played by a local incident during the 1894 flood in the genesis of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.31 Still more recently, a member of the Fitzroy Writers conjures

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up Banjo’s ghost in a search for his hero’s identity.32 In pieces like ‘He Hails from Snowy River’ and ‘The Drovers’, well-known postwar Bulletin contributors Lex McLennan and Merv Lilley adapt Paterson’s themes and characters to local conditions.33 Like the Anzac legend, the bush ethos is nurtured and reinvented by its regional exponents. In a similar vein, Mackay poet Ray Malone celebrates the physical achievement of cane-cutter Gordon Page. In an interesting variation on ‘The Man from Snowy River’, it is a young ‘dude from Sydney’ in Malone’s story who outperforms the veteran local cutters. Nor is Gordon Page the typical Australian male, for: On his feet were blue suede shoes Tattoos upon his arms Looks like a Sydney bodgie Not a bloke who worked on a farm.34 One of the roles of such local writing, in upholding and updating myths of mateship and masculinity, is to extend their influence beyond the stations and the mines to incorporate the canefields, the fishing industry and the meatworks. For more than a century the bush ethos remained influential not only in the far west but also in the coastal centres of Central Queensland, vying with and on occasion overturning the British-based preoccupations of the urban middle classes.As early as the 1880s, the Bulletin spawned a local imitator in the Laughing Jackass, a short-lived Rockhampton periodical based on political satire and commentary.While the local publication aped its Sydney counterpart’s irreverence for the colonial professions (including the press) and a disdain for religion and non-white races, it failed to attract local prose and verse contributions of merit. Most of its comic sketches, as with other newspapers, were directed at local identities. More consequential were the occasional tributes in verse to deceased public figures and politicians. While the Jackass was sufficiently orthodox to publish a eulogistic obituary to Darling Downs squatter and politician Sir Joshua Peter Bell,35 its Rockhampton successor, the Critic, was politically closer to the Sydney Bulletin; in support of the labour cause, it published a tribute in verse to Queensland labour pioneer Thomas Glassey.36

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Yet, overall, the Critic’s pretensions were no more literary than those of the Jackass. Both these local papers relied pre-eminently on a combination of political and sports reporting to sustain their local readerships.

A high literary tradition: the ‘Rockhampton School’37 While the long-term ascendancy of the bush ethos in central Queensland writing, and of the ‘democratic’ themes and forms associated with it, could hardly be gainsaid, there is nonetheless an important minor tradition comprising poets who took their inspiration rather from high literary classics of world literature, and who engaged, imaginatively and often successfully, with those canonical texts. It is hardly surprising that Henry Arthur Kellow (1881–1935), a Scottish teacher of English literature, and the author of several textbooks on the subject, should have devoted a chapter to these poets, to whom he gave the name ‘The Rockhampton School’, in his groundbreaking study The Queensland Poets in 1930.38 Kellow had been Headmaster of the Rockhampton Grammar School since 1912, and his book reflected his wish to provide his own students with simultaneous access to local and canonical literature. The youngest and most ambitious of the group was Henry Birkbeck (1850–1882), the fourth son of a scholarly English traveller and a Mexican mother. At the tender age of 22 – he died only ten years later – Birkbeck composed a 2,500-line epic poem, Cupid and Psyche, a spiritual allegory of the growth of the human soul. The scholarship is formidable, and if the quality of the verse is not as Miltonic as Birkbeck hoped it would be, it was still, in Kellow’s judgment, ‘the most considerable effort in [epic] blank verse that has been produced in Queensland’39 – a judgment that may still apply. Birkbeck, in any case, was prepared to chance his arm: What though I be Young, inexperienced, perhaps o’er bold, The Muse propitious, may benignly smile And oft sustain my too ambitious flight.40 Heber Hedley Booth (1864–1926), by contrast, was something of a wandering minstrel. He was born and died in Brisbane, but during

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his fifty years’ service with the Post and Telegraph Office he lived for long periods in many parts of Queensland, from Brisbane to the Gulf, and from Rockhampton to the far West, and published in some fifteen mainly provincial Queensland newspapers. Opalodes (1909) is a volume of ‘patriotic and miscellaneous verses’ (the title refers to his early pen-name, ‘Opal’). As one might expect, many of the poems reflect humorously on the rough characters of the Queensland backblocks; but a surprising number reveal his keen appreciation of poets like Dante, Petrarch and the English love poets of the seventeenth century. In ‘A Northern Tribute to Southern Beauty’ (written during his sojourn in the Gulf Country) he exhorts Australian poets to emulate them, thereby honouring Australian women and improving the general tone of society. The interplay of ‘northern’ (Australia) and ‘southern’ (hemisphere) is an intriguing feature of Booth’s regional perspective. I deem it shame that in this Southern land, Though hearts of thousands feel our ladies’ sway, There rise so few to touch with skilful hand The lutes of Chivalry, whose tuneful play Would bid the buds of courtesy expand . . .41 Booth’s own miscellaneous ‘civilising’ efforts include experiments in a wide range of ‘difficult’ older poetic forms such as triolets, ballades, rondeaux, epigrammatic quatrains, and of course sonnets in abundance. He also wrote skilful ‘imitations’ of Scott, Meredith, Whitman, Longfellow and Kipling. Like Booth, George Herbert Rogers (1872–1926), for several years the Anglican Archdeacon of Rockhampton, seasoned his serious poetry – in his case poetry of a sacred cast – with lighter verse, much of it in the technically complex and demanding forms of the high literary tradition. And like Booth he saw no incongruity in using these to reflect on the scenes and characters of the Rockhampton diocese. His ‘Villanelle of Andy and Cocky’, a dialogue in strict villanelle form between a sundowner’s complaining dog and cockatoo, is a small triumph of delicate whimsy. Like Henry Birkbeck (and perhaps this impulse is somehow symptomatic of the regional or provincial mindset), Rogers also takes

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modest pains to dampen the reader’s expectations of his performance. In a sonnet on the sonnet, he observes, in the first of a sequence of them, ’Tis used of greatest poets and of least. The lesser use it for their poverty In thought and rhythm, which, were the length increased, Might prove them beggars; but the greater vie One with another to provide a feast Dainty, yet brief. Less than the least am I.42 Lance Fallaw (1876–1958), the latest-born and longest-lived of the ‘Rockhampton School’, was also its most substantial and most influential poet. Born in Gateshead in the north of England, he worked on the literary staff of newspapers in Newcastle (England), Durban, Rockhampton, Charters Towers, Geelong and Sydney.43 He published three volumes of poetry, the first, Silver Leaf and Oak (1906), reflecting English and South African scenes and experiences, and the second, An Ampler Sky (1909), predominantly the early years of his life in Australia – ‘an enlargement of outlook which the title in some degree seeks to convey’.44 This is the volume in which Fallaw’s most interesting quality comes most to the fore: what might be termed his intense bookishness, not in the pejorative sense of a passive withdrawal from ‘real life’ – the adventurous Fallaw lived a more active and varied working life than most – but rather in the sense of enriching and intensifying his own life-experiences through books. More than a third of the volume is directly concerned with the pleasures of literature, including ‘The Library’, a sequence of twenty-four short poems with titles like ‘Old Missals’, ‘The House of Many Books’, and ‘The Book-Lover’s Calendar’.The pick of the volume, however, is undoubtedly ‘A Queensland House-Warming’, a long poem which presents itself as an invitation to a friend in England to emigrate to Queensland. After about a hundred lines evoking the natural beauties, mild climate and conviviality, Fallaw begins a forty-line conclusion with these astonishing words: And there you’ll find, all opening to the hand, Books, the first harvest of this later land . . . 45

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He goes on to itemise lovingly, first the Australian poems (Gordon and Kendall), and then the English and Scottish poems the reading of which will bring the Queensland surroundings to new life: Hemmed by Australian streams, our eyes may note The Scholar-Gipsy and his moon-lit boat; And through the Australian echoes seems to ring The last great war of Lancelot and the King. Till all the ages seems a moving sea, For ever blending, and for ever ours, Even as our thought one moment overpowers The sense of spaces measured by the sun, And England – home – Australia, all are one!46 More than the other poets of the School, Fallaw conveys – at least in An Ampler Sky – a real sense of the value of a ‘bookish’ culture in the Rockhampton community of the early twentieth century. His third volume, Unending Ways (1926), is more preoccupied with the tragedy of the Great War and the glory of the Empire and is a slighter book; but it contains, in ‘The Land of Slain Souls’, an unforgettably bleak evocation of the loneliness of the bush woman: When by the door yon woman stands And shades the sunlight with her hands, Her eyes seem wan and strange. She has not learned in empty lands To look for change.47 Fallaw’s acknowledged influence on the Gladstone-born poet Val Vallis is discussed later in this chapter. The larger question of whether the high literary leanings of Kellow’s ‘Rockhampton School’ as a whole continued with any vigour in later decades is difficult to answer with any certainty, but the published record suggests a general turn towards popular traditions in the 1930s. The outstanding exception to this generalisation is the strange figure

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of William A. Amiet (1890-1959), who was born and educated in Victoria, but who lived from 1920 in Mackay where he practised as a barrister, contributed hundreds of literary articles and reviews to the Mackay Mercury, amassing an enormous library, and publishing several very learned books on astronomy, world literature, and the practice of literary history. Though also a poet in a modest way, Amiet’s main significance would seem to be as a remarkable, if not unique, survival of some of the more recondite literary and intellectual interests of the Rockhampton School.48

Conflict and the Depression By the turbulent 1890s, bush ballads and regional writing echoed conflicts in the Central Queensland pastoral industry. The pamphlet Droving Experiences, published by the Morning Bulletin for E. G. Tomkins, reflects the changing relations between masters and men. In his long poem based on a droving trip from Rockhampton, the author records characters and conditions, including a successful strike by the drovers for higher wages. Without resorting to the industrial warfare that erupted a year later (‘I do not blame employers here’), it anticipates a period in which Henry Lawson’s underdog sentiments appear more immediate than the playfulness of Paterson.49 In Central Queensland writing on the strikes, coastal Rockhampton is often depicted as a site of the pastoral establishment and of law and order. It became, as Geoffrey Bolton has explained, a centre for the mobilisation of capital interests, including strike-breaking militias and a point of entry for non-union labour.50 Along with William Lane’s celebrated account of the shearers’ trials for the Worker newspaper, a number of fictional accounts of these events are set in and around Rockhampton.They appear in a variety of forms: as episodes in novels, stage plays or station writing. On ‘Moongarr’ station, Praed’s unconventional heroine, Lady Bridget, champions the cause of the oppressed, including unionists.51 Perhaps emboldened by the defiant mood of labour writing in the 1890s, regional poets expressed a new-found confidence and State pride in the immediate aftermath of Federation. In ‘Queensland 1902-03’, Heber Hedley Booth characterised the new state as a ‘young and stalwart giant, whose form shows / Promise of latent strength to meet each

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call / Of matured manhood’ and who evinced ‘manly scorn of those who croak Despair’.52 Booth’s sentiments were endorsed by Lance Fallaw, whose poem ‘A Queensland House-Warming’ extols: Our cooler time, our winter, though you’ll think ’Tis Spring prolonged, without one broken link, So bright the air, so tremulous the blue, Whose very frost is but like deeper dew.53 While drawing on a variety of settings and themes, both Booth and Fallaw wrote poems inspired by local places. Rather than extolling the bush, however, Booth’s ‘Sunset on the Berserker Mountains Rockhampton’ and ‘Ballade of Gladstone’ were poems of river and sea.54 This strand of writing was to resurface later in the work of Val Vallis, John Blight and others. Decades after Booth and Fallaw, Merv Lilley’s collection of ballads from across Australia is closer to the Lawson tradition and includes Queensland material from Mackay, Townsville and Mount Isa. Lilley, recalling industrial strife in Rockhampton during the 1949 coal strike, writes with bitterness about his home town and surroundings: ‘I never pass through that town I will not call a city without knowing you, mediaeval place of ignorance and bigotry.’55 That radical political writing was real but exceptional nearer the coast is confirmed by the voluminous and eccentric publications of Rockhampton socialist and window-cleaner J. H. Wood (‘John O’Rockie’) in the early twentieth century. A contributor to the Brisbane Worker during the First World War and a voluble critic of the local Morning Bulletin, Wood wrote and self-published a number of tracts on radical political economy as well as anti-war poems. His ‘Rebel Lay’, written in 1916 at the height of the Great War, reflects the early militancy of Henry Lawson, albeit with pacifist overtones: Hark! Hark! my comrades, a song I shall sing, ’Tis not of a Kaiser, a Czar, nor a King; But of the hardy Sons of Toil, Who in the fierce turmoil Of industrial life wield not sword or sabre,

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No ‘hired assassins’ they To stab and shoot and slay, For bloodless triumphs are the victories of Labour. We must down with the rule of gun and sabre So that men the world o’er May live as brothers evermore, In a Commonwealth of Love and Peace and Labour.56 Lawson’s battler perspective was equally in evidence in writing of the Depression, when war heroes were reduced to impoverished humiliation through protracted unemployment. Unlike the traditional ballads of Fred Strutt, a returned digger poet who continued to extol the lifestyle and romance of the west, other Central Queenslanders adopted a realist perspective in their verse or prose.57 Ted Smith, a Bundaberg Second World War veteran, recalls the harshness of the Depression in poems like ‘The Butcher’ and ‘When the Dole Was Called the Susso’, along with tributes to local heroes Bert Hinkler and Bombshell Barnes. As coastal writers continue to do, Smith in ‘Charm City’ points to the limitation of the bush tradition in the case of his native Bundaberg: The bush bards of the years gone by have written loud and long Of the she oaks and the sunburnt plains and horsemen brave and strong Not a single word of the sugar land and the rolling fields of green Where man has worked in hand with God to make this changing scene.58 It was nevertheless critical confirmation of the still dominant literary trend which persisted in Central Queensland writing until as late as the 1970s. Among the most poignant accounts of the Depression is James Maizey and Claire Williams’s The Orphan Swaggy, the autobiography of Jim Maizey and his youthful struggle for survival in Central Queensland. On the track at fifteen years of age, Maizey looks back on his time spent among swaggies and his brushes with authority with a combination of

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realism and romance. One temptation for a young man, in the effort to make money, was to join Sharman’s boxing troupe or take on the local champion. In Peter James’s romanticised encounter of such a contest, the newcomer is victorious. But in the starker realism of Maizey’s Depression account, the underdog suffers a punishing humiliation (‘No chance to escape. Gidyea was out to kill me all right . . .’), reminiscent of his earlier mistreatment at the hands of authority: The whole ordeal seemed totally unethical, and as I stumbled along I likened his treatment of me to that of the headmaster of Blair Athol, or more strongly, the policeman who hit me with the baton. No compassion.59 The verse of Smith and the prose of Maizey were published late in their lives, confirming that Depression conditions were unfavourable to regional publishing. The ironic recollection of a Gladstone immigrant whose poetry was rejected by the Sydney Bulletin epitomises the frustrations of regional aspirants at this time: ‘I sent some verse to the Sydney Bulletin and asked for a candid criticism. It was candid all right, thus: “Well, we have seen worse verse, but not much of it”.’60 Apart from the Bulletin, regional writers relied on Queensland newspapers for publication outlets, albeit without much in the way of remuneration. Fred Strutt, for example, published his poems of the 1920s in the Central Queensland Herald and the Peak Downs Telegram.61 But for bush balladists there were no regular outlets comparable with the ‘Bill Bowyang’ and ‘Smoko’ columns of the North Queensland Register. Merv Lilley explains the low esteem in which most literary contributors were then held within the field of journalism: The Central Queensland Herald is, or was, the weekly version of the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, plus contributors’ pages in which some of us tried our fists at submitting contributions which if published were paid for at ninepence a line – except for the freelance section which consisted of poetry and prose which wasn’t paid for at all, it being of no value and merely to indulge the writers who wanted to have a play around.62

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In regional newspapers there was less commitment to local fiction, with the notable exception of the serialisation after the Second World War of The House of Winston Blaker by Edith McKay (who also published as E. Dithmack). For the most part, local writing appeared in the form of verse on a weekly basis. During the 1930s the Herald’s ‘Poet’s Corner’ column was attracting four to six poems per issue from a small core of regular contributors.The same paper, for a brief period, also created a ‘Book Club’ column with occasional reviews of Australian works. Among the more prominent Herald contributors of the period was Rockhamptonite Louis Arthur Sigsworth who subsequently collected his newspaper verse for the period 1928–34 into three volumes. His contributions also appeared in other Australian journals including the Sydney Bulletin. In keeping with the bush ethos, Sigsworth claimed to know ‘nothing of the techniques of verse and would not let anyone tell me about it because I do not wish to join the already too large band of correct, stodgy versifiers’.63 His ‘Tramp a Long Road at Night Time’ and his other poems incorporate Depression themes.64 In addition to newspaper verse, he was sufficiently versatile to pen a series on racing and to win an award for his prose. Sigsworth’s determination, as a regular Central Queensland Herald contributor, distinguished him from other aspirants. He sought to establish a local network of writers through the Herald and pressed its literary editor, with limited success, to market local manuscripts to Australian publishers.65 When, however, the Herald embarked in January 1933 on an experimental ‘Free Lance’ page to make space for local poetry and prose, the response was modest. Nevertheless, the Herald’s ‘Poet’s Corner’ did feature several regular writers in addition to Sigsworth, Mary House (Hewitt) and Edith Kennedy being the most prolific. As in the colonial period when bush ballads were regarded as too melancholic for readers, Depression newspapers demanded diversion and amusement from their contributors. Along with the realism of Sigsworth, the Herald welcomed ‘sweet singers like Mary House and her ilk’.66 Mary House, who married and settled in the Dawson Valley at the turn of the century, sent poems regularly to the Herald from Charleville station near Theodore.67 While other contributors wrote in general terms of the splendours of the west, House set out to capture the natural beauties of her own locality in such poems as ‘A Garden Idyll’, ‘Among the Corn’, ‘Voice of the Night’ and

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‘An Australian Love Song’.68 House’s lyricism did much to soften the harsh imagery of the bush during the Depression period, by localising and personalising her regular contributions. In the nostalgic long poem ‘The Little Dawson Girl’, House anticipates by a period of five years her subsequent departure from station life to live in Rockhampton: Never a Dawson sunset with rapture kin to pain By the light its glowing beauty should fill my heart again But over the vale of darkness a radiant dawn shall rise, And Christ will bid me welcome in the fields of Paradise.69 Her collection of her poems Lest We Forget: Poems of the Dawson Valley, published in 1946, was dedicated to the memory of a son killed on the Kokoda Track.70

War writing A regional preoccupation with war and its personal legacy, like Depression accounts, was often retrospective and no less enduring. After the First World War, Fred Strutt’s collection, The Song of an Outback Bloke, published by the Rockhampton Returned Soldiers’ League, was well received locally. Strutt included, along with his traditional bush pieces, a number of sombre war poems, among them ‘The Soldiers of Today’, ‘The Men Who Survive’, ‘Bernie’ and ‘Lines to a War Monument’.71 In the process, he upheld and redefined the cult of mateship. Strutt’s poems accentuate the difficulties of returning servicemen, unlike Norman Norman’s poem ‘Après la Guerre’, which dwells on the pleasure of rediscovering old haunts: I’m happy now I’m in the bush, contentment now I know. Oh! – I’ve longed for horse and saddle for four long years or so.72 By comparison with earlier work, recent war writing appears more conventional and nationalistic. Since the 1980s, the strength of the Anzac tradition resurfaces in Bob Read’s Sarina collection73 (‘Anzac Day’, ‘The Tears of Anzac’) and in the output of the Fitzroy Writers Network, which upheld tradition at the time of the Bicentenary. Jean Renew’s

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contemporary defence of the diggers in her ‘Anzac Day’ confirms renewed interest at a regional level in commemorating the military past after the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam years: Now you and I are back again To march on Anzac Day And we are sick with grieving when We hear the ‘Peace’ folk say: It was our soldiers made the wars With their blood lust unabating These poor old soldiers fought for laws Against ignorance, greed and hating.74 In a more personal vein is the work that appears both during and immediately after the Great War.The tribute paid by Rockhampton headmaster Arthur Kellow to his talented pupil, J. D. (Jack) Fryer, who died from the effects of gassing in France, is among the most poignant. One of his few surviving poems, Kellow’s elevated ‘To Our Old Boy’ appears in the Rockhampton Grammar School Magazine of June 1923: I hear you now converse with glee Pattern of schoolboy chivalry! And then the higher learning calls; Your spirit flits in college halls, Whence summoned by the blast of war – Because your thoughts aye noble are – You grimly stalk o’er Flanders plain And fight your battle o’er again.75 The tribute of George Herbert Rogers to a local woman, Mrs Wheeler, who kept house and welcomed Australian troops in London throughout the conflict, is more comforting: Often you sit and hear the tale retold Of deadly fight and wounds and watchings cold Where the great armies, locked in conflict, stand.

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And as you speak, our lads forget their pain, And hear the traffic on the wharves astir, And see the long low-builded waterside, The rocky bar that stems the flowing tide, And like a sleeping monster, Berserker Heave his big back to skies without a stain.76 Mrs Wheeler is also acknowledged by Mary Rattenbury in her 1936 collection, Pen Blossoms.77 While Rattenbury’s Yeppoon-based work reflects the ambivalence of a local wartime population, at once patriotic yet yearning for peace, J. H. Wood’s anti-war poems ‘Submarine’ and ‘In Supplication’, written in 1915, confirm the polarising effect of war on Australian society.78 At the same time, wartime writing can still be flippant and satirical. Walter Prizeman’s poem of the same year, ‘The Loyal Dago’, for all its offensiveness, was not untypical of the racially charged songs and ballads circulating among the servicemen themselves. The same contrasting moods are apparent in the Central Queensland output on the Second World War, when Queensland became a war zone and the threat of invasion was etched into collective memory. The wry Australian humour of ‘Dear Mum, I’m safe and well’ in Read’s Little People: Poets and Places of Sarina, is in striking contrast to the intense ‘Jungle Patrol 1942’ of the same collection.79 Regional writing by and about women during wartime is equally varied. The Mackay Australia Remembers collection of 1995 features A. C. W. Fossey’s irreverent ‘Ode to the WAAF’, along with G. M. Galletly’s ‘A Prayer,Written in 1941’, which captures the mood of a woman sitting and thinking of ‘the joys to come when trouble and strife are through’.80 In a similar vein, Rattenbury’s ‘Who Fights the Greatest Fight?’ from the First World War dwells not on ‘the boy who faces death’ but on the woman who ‘has fought the greatest battle / Since this world first began’: Oh! ’Tis the womenfolk at home Who fight the greatest fight.81

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More conventional in the Digger tradition of the Second World War are Tip Keleher’s ‘Exiles’, the nostalgic reminiscence of a Queensland outback soldier stationed in Egypt, and Doug Wallace’s humorous tale of the Pacific front on board ship, in which he has to honour a bet ‘to recite poetry for three hours in the middle of the Coral Sea’.82 In prose writing, memories of the home front allude repeatedly to the tense year 1942 when Queensland’s rural innocence gave way to invasion scares and austerity measures. Recollections published well after the event mention wartime developments like the Coral Sea amid the everyday exigencies of rationing and labour shortages. Mackay author Noel Fatnowna remembers that his teacher ‘got up on the desk in front of our room and told us our country was at war and we were to go home immediately’.83 Notwithstanding the more recent upsurge in wartime writing, the vivid recollections of Fatnowna and Mabel Edmund constitute an important and distinct strain of regional work. Edmund’s engaging stories about the Central Queensland Islander community confirm Fatnowna’s observations that Islander men did not usually enlist but were required to perform civil construction work in northern Australia.84 Bernard John Bettridge’s brief but informative memoir, based on Clermont and the Central Queensland Highlands, emphasises the strategic importance of inland defence roads that were constructed from Clermont to Charters Towers in northern Queensland. The same author acknowledges the role of local internees in road construction around Mackay.85 Although rumours of invasion loom large in Second World War writing, their treatment varies from the sinister to the farcical, in keeping with the diverse output of the First World War. Jean Renew, working as a wartime radio operator along the Queensland coast, remembers being sworn to silence after seeing ‘something strange about the shapes of the trees’ and ‘armed soldiers in every third tree’ around the time of the Coral Sea battle.86 Stories of Japanese landings and skirmishes with Allied troops persist in Central Queensland more than fifty years later. Drama and humour intermingle in the wartime memories of Valda Winsor, who grew up in a Maltese family on Brampton Island. She recalled seeing American vessels gathering for what was to be the Battle of the Coral Sea, but real fears of Japanese invasion were also disguised beneath the

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humour of a false alarm. In one episode of Island that We Knew, she recalls seeing: HEADS! Dozens of dark heads of enemy troops, sneaking along in formation! . . . Then, across a clearing at the end of the lantana bushes, marched a very long row of little figures – our turkeys . . .87 One reason for the prominence of Islander and ethnic accounts lies in a preference for coastal living, coupled with a longstanding exclusion from the larger populated centres.While Winsor’s account of her Brampton Island years is a nostalgic one of an ‘enchanted place’, fascinating sea creatures and colourful local characters, Fatnowna’s and Edmund’s resilient stories also allude to prejudice against their communities, who lived and hunted around the smaller coastal settlements. Living at Eimeo, Fatnowna did not visit nearby Mackay until the age of fourteen, when ‘we’d catch this bus to town and the bus would be sort of half and half – half Maltese and half black’.88 He recalls playing pranks on visiting Americans on Eimeo beach during the war. There were also moments of tragedy, regardless of the respite from invasion, notably in Mabel Edmund’s account of the Joskeleigh community on Keppel Sands where army camps were established: when a bomb killed a local boy on Long Beach, the Joskeleigh community was devastated.89

Renewing the legend: the postwar period If the preoccupation with war and its impact remains an enduring feature of regional writing in Central Queensland, it did not diminish the ongoing appeal of bush themes. After the strains of the Depression and war, the celebratory strain of bush writing once again resurfaced, although increasingly merging with, and complicated by, subjects and themes drawn from coastal living, mining and tourism. The Central Queensland selections for The Queensland Centenary Anthology (1959) reveal the diversity of regional literary output of this era. Along with the conventional bush ballads and stories, an emerging maritime and coastal writing tradition features more systematically, often conflating elements of the bush ethos with coastal occupations and lifestyles. Taroom-based balladist Lex McLennan made noteworthy

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contributions to the Sydney Bulletin and the North Queensland Register. In the introduction to his collection, The Spirit of the West (1943), McLennan affirms his intention: Their days are lost in the drifts of ages, And I have striven, with halting pen, To keep alive in these printed pages The tales of the old grey Queensland men. McLennan’s ballads celebrate feats of daring horsemanship throughout Queensland, including the exploits of the ‘roughriders and cattlemen of the Dawson River, Taroom and the Burnett Hills’ (among them, Jim Mulvaney, Fred Shean and ‘Boomerang’ Brady). Under the influence of Paterson and the Bulletin school, McLennan in ‘The Queensland Steers’ draws on Central Queensland folklore to challenge the myths of southern counterparts: Calved to the coastal country, bred on the blue grass plains, Run from the miles of mulga when white foam creamed the reins, Their myriad battalions have trooped the stock routes down Since the Gulf was unknown country and Brisbane just a town. The Queensland scrubs are lonely and Queensland plains are wide, And over Queensland pastures the world’s best stockmen ride . . .90 Another prominent Central Queensland poet of the postwar period was Val Vallis. Raised in Gladstone,Vallis was encouraged in his literary interests by a schoolteacher aunt, Rose Bancroft, and received a secondary education at Rockhampton State High School before embarking on a successful career as a poet and academic. Vallis’s postwar anthologies, Songs of the East Coast (1947) and Dark Wind Blowing (1961), included Gladstone poems inspired by his upbringing in the coastal city. Several were to appear in school texts. ‘Michael’, a poem that blends the simplicity of regional living with the poetry of the sea, was included in the 1959 Queensland Centenary Anthology edited by R. S. Byrnes and Vallis. That Vallis drew much of his inspiration from his experiences of the Central Queensland coast is apparent in ‘Songs of the East Coast’. The

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poem is dated ‘Madang 1944’, indicating that it was written while the author was serving in the Australian army during the Second World War, but Vallis’s thoughts are of home: My father has fished in these waters. I remember him unloading at the water’s edge His chests filled with ice and vacant-eyed fish. Other times he has come home with empty baskets, to tell Of coral he had seen, and bright circuses of fish In gay parade by rocky amphitheatres; Even a mermaid slipped through his starlit nets. We are the little people who fish and lift Clear scrub and work shifts in slaughter yards . . .91 The merging of the bush ethos into the literature of coastal life is a notable feature of Vallis’s work. In a foreword to the 1997 edition of his Songs of the East Coast, Vallis recalled as a significant formative influence the Rockhampton poet Lance Fallaw, who had celebrated exploration and the sea in the early years of the century in both epic and lyrical styles. It was Fallaw who awakened him to the poetic potential of his own environment: ‘I suppose I vaguely realised that the stuff of poetry was all around and not stuck in England with the daffodils.’92 A further postwar writer who developed a state-wide following after the Second World War was R.S. (Richard) Porteous, who worked on Coomooboolaroo station near Duaringa from 1925 to 1937, and later settled in Mackay. Well known for his stories of outback and coastal Queensland, Porteous re-mythologised rural male identity in Cattleman (1960), a novel of the Brigalow Country and the winner of the 1000 Courier-Mail centenary competition in 1961. In a local review, the Morning Bulletin critic situated it firmly in a long tradition of Australian writing, of which Vance Palmer was an earlier exponent: The book shows that cattlemen still have to face much the same kind of thing now that they did then. They have modern amusements on their stations but they still have to combat drought and bushfire . . .93

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Robert Dixon has observed that Porteous’s pastoral sagas, Brigalow (1957) and Cattleman, ‘were much loved by readers in Central Queensland for their accurate depictions of station life and their celebration of a rural ethos’.94 Porteous, who ran a fishing business in the late 1930s and served on supply ships in the Second World War, also wrote coastal stories, collected in Little Known of These Waters (1945) and Close to the Wind (1955), in which the masculinity of the seagoing heroes shares many traits with that of Porteous’s rural heroes. An ongoing preoccupation with bush themes is no less apparent in Peter James’s Stories of Central Queensland (1982). Though not a native of Central Queensland, James evinces a nostalgia for the old ways and focuses on the 1950s in the preface, where he refers to ‘the passing of an era’ and the disappearing way of life represented by the ringer. James’s stories of Mount Myles and Rockhampton owe something to Banjo Paterson and Steele Rudd in their wry character sketches and themes. A characteristic of James’s Queensland bushmen is their humour and a capacity for playing practical jokes – whether it be on the old notorious Marlborough to Sarina coast road, where ringers awoke sleeping drivers by cracking stockwhips by the open windows of their cars, or at the Rockhampton rodeo, where in the 1950s ‘you could still see a man crawl up behind a dozing horse and bite it on the rear fetlock’.95 The most popular and acclaimed of the contemporary bush writers is arguably Charlie Marshall of Yaparaba, who, like James, began his Central Queensland career as a teacher before working on the land. Like his contemporary Merv Lilley, Marshall was born at Upper Ulam near Rockhampton. His talents as a performer, poet and short-story writer have been recognised and enlisted by the newly formed writers’ networks in the region. Marshall’s reputation, established since the 1980s, has been enhanced by his success at southern literary events such as the Henry Lawson competition event at Gulgong in New South Wales. Bush themes are a feature of Marshall’s poems and stories, including ‘Across the Condamine’ and ‘The Death of Kelly’, in which his well-developed sense of humour and irony are reminiscent of Lawson.96 The same techniques characterise his war poems. In ‘The Cadger’, the death of an ailing digger reveals an unexpected trophy:

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Yes, I’ll have one more, and then I must be going: There’s cows to milk, and horses I should ride . . . You really can’t expect those stupid creatures To care if someone’s drunken daddy died. Oh, yes . . . there was a medal with a ribbon Proclaiming through the verdigris below ‘For bravery beyond the call of duty’ Who . . . Emmet Anderson? Well there you go!97 Marshall’s ability to surprise the reader by way of conclusion takes a more personal turn in ‘The Sniper’, arguably the most forceful poem to appear on the hidden legacy of Vietnam. The author’s initial satisfaction at shooting a sniper in the field gives way to curiosity then disgust when he discovers a mere boy: He dodged from tree to tree, and, on his back, A fiendish bomb lurked in his haversack. I fired: he fell. My mates no longer hid, But gathered round in praise for what I did: And, still a hero, I undid the straps, To find a shattered toy, half cup of rice A net he used for catching butterflies: And far more cruel, Rebecca, far more cruel – His books ruled up for homework After School. In questioning the war tradition, itself unusual in recent Central Queensland writing, ‘The Sniper’ raises moral dilemmas and contemporary issues, as the author comes to identify his victim with his own children. Confronted with the same incomprehension as the deceased Emmet Anderson in ‘The Cadger’, Marshall concludes: You’ve got Vietnam Nerves a lady jeers But you and I Rebecca

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Know there are other reasons why People cry.98 No less prolific in the postwar Australian idiom is Bundaberg author Esme Gollschewsky, whose stories have appeared regularly in such journals as the Bulletin, Meanjin, Overland and Southerly, as well as being featured in notable collections like the Queensland Centenary Anthology and Heseltine’s Australian Idiom. Gollschewsky’s stories employ a direct unsentimental style in her depiction of selectors and farming or fishing communities. The treatment of rural courtship in ‘The Women at Rebe’s’ exemplifies this style, while her use of the ‘lost relative’ theme in ‘Where’s Grandpa’ permits a perceptive exploration of ageing and family relations.99 Peter James’s nostalgia in the 1950s, like Val Vallis’s poems of coastal living, anticipates a region in transition from simple working traditions to a new affluence derived from mining and tourism. An ongoing, yet uneasy, transformation of the rural proletariat sustains the Lawsonian tradition and is reflected in the verse of Merv Lilley and Mackay poet Ray Malone.While not the dominant strain of Central Queensland bush writing, politics and political verse contribute to postwar output. In Cautious Birds, Lilley identifies himself with the nomadic labouring traditions of the bush, recalling Mount Morgan prospector Harry Tims and their campfire politics: Work sobered we squatted at the crossroads talking poverty, the rights of man, until the clock had struck on ten years round, my first great knowing friend lay six feet underground.100 Elsewhere, Lilley celebrates the drovers of his native Ulam. While his Git Away Back: A Knockabout Life recalls campfire exchanges about Bob Menzies, he remembers on other occasions ‘the indifference of the drovers’ who ‘seemed only concerned to finish the night’s supply and get some sleep’. In pessimistic moments, Lilley envisages the rural proletariat as merely a dying museum species alongside ‘extinct mammals, flora and fauna – including a strata of people, by blazes’.101 Echoes of Lawson and the trials of rural labour can equally be located in the more diffuse postwar writing about miners and meatworkers. In

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‘The Coal Miners’, in Poems from Prison, Aboriginal author Eric MacKenzie graphically evokes the conditions of underground coal mining: They shuffle out, darkened by need, a minstrel show of faces, fake. Whites of eyes, rehearsed, encircle nothing of the miners’ deeper pits as though we might belong below the surface.102 By comparison with other manual occupations, mining has attracted relatively little poetic attention, Forbes being the notable exception from the early period. When mining does attract attention, it is often in the context of danger and disaster. Following fatal underground accidents at Mount Morgan in late 1908, the Critic published a stinging attack on a callous system: Just lifeless clay. And now no more the children Who loved him and would play around his knee. And the bitter tears fall even thick and fast when The mother thinks of him who used to be, And on the stone where these brave hearts lie sleeping, Why should we hesitate to say Of those poor souls safe now in God’s own keeping: ‘Butchered to make a magnate’s holiday.’103 More recently, L. C. Yummon’s ‘Thirteen Men’ in Toil, Despair and Tears recalls the first Moura disaster amid the optimism of Gladstone’s postwar growth. In the same collection, ‘True Experience’ draws on the author’s working life on a rig off Heron Island when a derrick bursts free in high seas and threatens the operation.104 The politics of meatworking are the subject of a number of poems by Ray Malone, whose ‘Meatworkers’ in Bad Poems, Top Blokes defends workers against accusations of industrial unrest. In ‘The Cattlemen’s Strike’ from the same volume, Malone nevertheless castigates his contemporaries for their lack of militancy. The meatworkers of the

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postwar years are threatened with lower wages and humiliation at the hands of management: I don’t believe you have the guts To fight like workers down the years have done You do not have the pride of these people Who have fought their Lords and won.105 The tension between the rights of contemporary workers to economic security and the militancy of the old hands is not unique to writing on meatworkers. Fear of compromise pervades Neil Florence’s poem on the 1957 shearers’ strike. A parody of Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’, it ends abruptly with the verdict that: No matter (now) the individual weather Bosses and workers sip tea together.106 More stark on workplace tensions is Peter James’s sinister yet arresting story ‘The Enforcer’, which depicts intimidation and revenge at the meatworks. Narrated in the first person, the story culminates in a barroom challenge by the author to a sadistic supervisor who has beaten up and dismissed a mate. To salvage his own reputation and goaded by the taunts of his fellow workers, he is forced into a showdown and extracts bloody revenge with a broken bottle. But mateship in this case does not engender change, only a desperate act of violence before the perpetrator is forced to move on alone.107

Racial themes While the Lawsonian strand in postwar Central Queensland writing is subservient to more conventional bush writing, it is also largely free of the racist sentiment that characterised the poems of Heber Hedley Booth or the journalism of William Lane. This reworking of racial themes marks a significant shift from the tenor of station literature and wartime writing. One worksite that is characterised as multiracial is the canefields, which attract a wide range of nationalities, including Melanesian and Italian labourers. Ronald McKie’s novel The Crushing (1977) describes

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the influx of workers from all over Australia. One of McKie’s characters, a Dr Telfer, speculates about the emergence of a new northern race in Queensland: Doc Telfer had a theory or two about these northerners among whom he had lived for much of his life.They were different people already, in much less than a century. They had even developed an accent of their own, more nasal than in the cold south . . . He also argued that in a thousand years . . . they would develop a pigment and that in another few thousand they would be as naturally dark-skinned as some of the southern Italians and Sicilians or Greeks who had arrived since the War.108 But the shift away from a monocultural vision towards a multicultural one is most pronounced in relation to the Aboriginal and Islander communities. By 1970 the Aboriginal stereotypes of the comic or docile savage give way to a better understanding of dispossession and of the previously concealed colonial legacy. In McKie’s acclaimed The Mango Tree (1974), the multiracial society of the sugar belt is not only visible during the cutting season, but remains a permanent feature of the social landscape.109 Beginning with a description of the local German and Chinese inhabitants of a fictional coastal town, based on his native Bundaberg, McKie’s novel features Italian musicians and Comino’s Greek café, Melanesian workers and Aboriginal traditions: the youthful main character learns about the existence of a local bora ring and the Islanders from his erratic mentor, the ‘Professor’. The Mango Tree draws on the ever-present and sensual image of the mango, captured in verse by McKie’s Rockhampton contemporary, Phil Brown: Verdant in the blanching sun Sit the mango trees; Swaying, solemnly they nod Garlanded with fruit and pod, Sighing as they quietly breathe, Fragrantly, the scent of God.110

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In the novel, the mango tree is closely bound up with regional adolescence: it becomes a vantage point for voyeurism and a portent of sexual awakening, as well as a childhood refuge. Among Australian-European writing, women contribute substantially to the new literature on racial themes. Both Thea Astley and Judith Wright have written about Central Queensland. Astley’s A Kindness Cup (1974) takes an historical incident as its point of departure – the leap outside Mackay from which an Aboriginal women is believed to have jumped to her death with her child to escape white pursuers – in order to explore more fully the scars of race relations in a frontier settlement. Drawing on evidence from an early Queensland Native Police inquiry, Astley constructs a story that exposes simmering tensions between local protectors of the Aborigines and the pillars of the town. A Kindness Cup describes the massacre in which the local tribe is all but annihilated, and the white community’s suppression of the truth about its past.111 New writing on race draws still more strongly on non-fiction in the case of Judith Wright’s The Cry for the Dead (1981). In the wake of her pioneering saga, The Generations of Men,Wright sets out to document the impact of Queensland pastoral migration on the Aborigines and the land. In the Foreword to The Cry for the Dead, she brings the issues of Aboriginal dispossession and resistance into clearer focus: For obvious reasons, the methods by which the Aboriginal resistance was overcome and the ways in which they were expelled from their land were seldom recorded. It was only when the resistance resulted in such notorious episodes as the Myall Creek case . . . or the Hornet Bank and Cullin-la-Ringo tragedies . . . that the blood and terror of the Black Wars was [sic] partly revealed. For the rest, the dispossession went on for the most part under cover of secrecy.112 Again, Wright’s quest is a personal one, as she seeks to elucidate the role of Charles Dutton, her grandfather’s friend, in attempting to protect the Wadja of Central Queensland from relentless pursuit and decimation. Significantly, Wright begins and ends The Cry for the Dead with the Wadja rather than the pastoralists, concluding with the retreat of the

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pioneers and the disintegration of the tribe. The final passage blends history and tragedy to produce an abiding preoccupation of Wright’s work – the disappearance of the Aborigines and the depletion of the environment: None of the descendants of Albert and May Wright now own land on the plain or beyond it; and perhaps none of the descendants of the Wadja, if any remain, have seen the country that once was theirs. At Woorabinda reserve, the Aborigines still congregate under the watchful eye of the white officers, subject even now to laws which have scarcely changed since the time of Archibald Meston. Above them, the cliffs and ravines of Expedition Range perhaps still shelter, in caves and overhangs, the crumbling bones of those who were pursued there more than a century ago . . .113 Well before The Cry for the Dead,Wright’s poetry identifies strongly with the land and its original inhabitants. She pays tribute to Central Queensland places and the Indigenous presence in poems such as ‘Seven Songs from a Journey’, which begins with ‘Carnarvon Range’: Carnarvon Creek And cliffs of Carnarvon your tribes are silent; I will sing for you – Some of Wright’s ‘Seven Songs from a Journey’, notably ‘Brigalow Country’ and ‘Canefields’, were written at a time of renewed acquaintance with Central Queensland.114 As her reputation grew in the 1960s,Wright’s vision inspired a generation of regional poets. Her influence is apparent in the orientation of work from the Bundaberg Arts Festival of the 1970s, including Gollschewky’s ‘No More the Didgeridoo’ and Graham Rowlands’s ‘Woodchip Woodchop’.115 Among established poets, Ann Lloyd and Rob Hay, while both pre-eminently love poets, confirm a new awareness of the importance of Aboriginality. Lloyd, in interview, contends that ‘the Aboriginal understanding is as close as I could come to religion’.116 Hay’s monologue in

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‘Ceremonial Site’ establishes an ironic contrast between the everyday visitor and the timelessness of Aboriginal tradition, from which he is excluded: Once in an exam I answered a question about Judith Wright’s poems filled with patterned sound so I went where the tourist map said Bora Ring. I have to believe it was a sacred site, there seemed no other reason to mark it, no-one selling souvenir tea-towels or devonshire teas. But I felt nothing numinous . . .117

Aboriginal and Islander writing The burgeoning field of Aboriginal and Islander work is so central to new Central Queensland writing that, although the topic is dealt with more fully in the chapter by Maggie Nolan, it is appropriate to discuss some of the major contributions here. Mabel Edmund’s reminiscences of north Rockhampton and the Joskeleigh Islander community in Hello, Johnny! provide a vivid understanding of the mutual struggle of both groups living as fringe dwellers around regional townships. While insecurity and indignity are integral to narratives like Edmund’s Hello, Johnny! and Noel Fatnowna’s Fragments of a Lost Heritage, their works have much to say about the survival and success of their resilient communities. Edmund, after mothering a large family during the Depression and the Second World War, embarks on a successful career as a politician, artist and writer. Fatnowna’s Mackay-based narrative equally concludes with the conviction that ‘[a]fter the war, things were better’, in spite of protracted discrimination.118 Whereas the appeal of Edmund’s and Fatnowna’s work lies in its gift for story-telling and oral reminiscence, Faith Bandler recreates her ancestors’ arrival and struggle for dignity as plantation labourers in the novel Wacvie (1977). Like Astley, Bandler uses historic events, including the Mackay Racecourse riot, in her reconstruction of emancipation and flight from Mackay to northern New South Wales. She is also able in a fictional format to explore at greater length taboos such as the illicit sexual relations between black and white in the colonial period. While Fatnowna recalls

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the taboo on white girls for Islander youth, Bandler depicts master–servant relations which are often sexual and which cross both gender and race. Thus Maggie Cameron, the overseer’s wife at Wacvie, vies unsuccessfully with her Islander servant Eamon for the favours of a company visitor.119 Just as Judith Wright’s regional work crosses a range of genres (including poetry, station writing and the novel), so the new Indigenous and Islander writers employ intertextual devices that are often grounded in existing bush conventions. Imprisoned Aboriginal poet Eric MacKenzie invokes images of outback and mateship in lines reminiscent of Paterson and Lawson: Last night as we enjoyed a quiet cigger, The stars reflecting open life outback, The knack we had of mateship was much bigger Than any conversation . . . I buried that old hat of mine beside you It wasn’t seemly somehow, with you dead, To just observe the minute’s pause relied to, And place the bloody thing back on my head.120 Fatnowna’s accounts of youthful football skirmishes and brushes with the law in Mackay evoke the larrikin strain of C. J. Dennis, while the anecdote of his father’s reckless driving on first receiving a licence is reminiscent of Paterson’s Mulga Bill fiasco.121 In similar fashion, Mabel Edmund’s snake encounter during her hut-dwelling days at Joskeleigh provides an interesting variant on ‘The Drover’s Wife’. Admitting to being ‘a bit trigger happy in those days’, the author of Hello, Johnny! recalls the .22 rifle and box of bullets kept by the family bed when her husband, Digger, was away. When confronted by a snake, she acts quickly and more decisively than Lawson’s heroine: . . . I reached for the old rifle and loaded it and sitting in the bed with the kids all around me I shot the snake’s head clean off. When the kids told our neighbour, old Peter Yow Yeh, the next day what I had done, he was shocked and he came over and I was given

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a lecture about irresponsible trigger-happy people who never think about ricocheting bullets. After he gave me the dressing down, he thought about the funny side of it and he had a good laugh.122 Undoubtedly, one of the durable attractions of the often indirect and unassuming prose writing by Edmund and Fatnowna is its rich reworking of orthodox bush themes. If Aborigines and Islanders appear set apart from the white population, they are equally recognisable as archetypal Australian battlers. The writing by and about Aboriginal people in contemporary regional work employs a range of devices to produce new and varied effects. One technique used by Marilyn Arnold in ‘The Ballad of Mosquito’ is to write Aboriginal historical actors like the black Tasmanian bushranger into the bush tradition.123 While Arnold uses a conventional, indeed conservative, form to highlight historical injustice, her poem ‘We Australians’, published in 1976, employs the language of patriotism to confirm difference: This expansive sun-drenched land where life was pure and free Now raises a malicious hand on the likes of mine and me. I’m Australian, hard and fast, born of the great outback I always will be, till the last, but I’m despised – I’m black.124 By the 1990s the noteworthy efforts of the Rockhampton Writers’ Club to encourage local Aboriginal writing and themes were being rewarded. At the same time, there emerges, along with the personal narratives of Aboriginal and Islander people, a bleaker strain of writing on race relations which questions hopes of reconciliation. Just as a new awareness of domestic violence calls into question the idealised traditional images of masculinity, so ‘A Time Together’ by Aboriginal poet Eric MacKenzie explodes the bond of prison mateship after a death in custody: Any comics to swap? Better to laugh instead of acting imprisoned

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four-eight-three said. I listened. Months later they found him hung by blanket [sic] from these bars – this window which isn’t – bleached face, blue lip, tongue black, big as a cricket ball. How human. After all those nervous nights at theft of valuables, he left only embarrassment.125 A similar pessimism pervades the powerful award-winning story ‘Jingi’ by Margaret Brice.126 A story about the unsuccessful efforts of an Aboriginal station hand to succeed on white terms, the events are recounted laconically through the conversations of local whites and ends with Jingi’s death in a prison cell after mistreatment by an employer. In this instance, the fatalism that characterises the exchanges of the white male characters is no longer a social virtue but conceals deep injustices beneath a veneer of indifference.

Conclusion Central Queensland regional writing not only reproduces and embellishes the national literary imaginary through genres like the ballad, station writing and war writing; it may equally anticipate the Bulletin ethos in the nineteenth-century work of Forbes and Loyau, or replenish it during the 1950s through the verse and prose of McLennan and Gollschewsky. Conventional rural settings provide points of departure for a more critical exploration of contemporary social issues like race and the environment, as evidenced by Judith Wright and her regional emulators. The bush ethos during the twentieth century also adapts itself to encompass new influences drawn from coastal living, mining and tourism. Finally, the rural, masculine and racial assumptions of a resilient bush ethos are also contested and subverted in contemporary Central Queensland writing in ways that are both playful and profound.

PART 3: Western Queensland

‘Where the Pelican Builds’: Writing in the West Robin Trotter and Belinda McKay The boundaries of writing in the West are not determined by hard lines on a map but suggested by a sense of place that coalesces around a region readily identified by ‘outsiders’ as well as ‘insiders’ as ‘Western Queensland’. Just as the boundaries are smudged and often indeterminate, the genres too are open, with writers’ interests and themes crisscrossing genres and intersecting with the theme of place.The arid and semi-arid parts of Queensland west of the Great Divide, north of the border with New South Wales and south of the Gulf of Carpentaria – including the Channel Country and the Gulf Country, and towns as diverse as Birdsville, Mt Isa and Longreach – form a unique region that addresses the rest of Australia, and increasingly the world, with a distinctive voice.

Regionalism and remoteness One of the defining features of western Queensland is its remoteness.The notion of remoteness has a special significance in an Australian context: not only is Australia remote from major world populations and power bases but our own concentrations of populations are distant from each other. As Geoffrey Blainey wrote in The Tyranny of Distance, ‘Distance is as characteristic of Australia as mountains are of Switzerland.’1 From the colonial period and up to the middle of the twentieth century, remoteness was associated with the ‘otherness’ of the ‘dead’ centre, and opposed to the relative cultural richness of the coastal periphery. A

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whole Australian lexicon is devoted to remoteness:‘back o’Bourke’,‘back of beyond’, ‘back of Queensland’ or just ‘outback’. At the same time, as Suzanne Falkiner suggests, these naming strategies ‘evolved from a necessity to find terms for the immensity and distances of the inland landscape’. Mystery and mastery are complementary themes to the remoteness and ‘unknowability’ of the Outback: ‘Possession is signified by naming; for Europeans something that cannot be named cannot be owned.’2 Craig Munro refers to the rediscovery of the bush and the ‘vast open spaces’ as a ‘central obsession’ of the 1930s.3 This obsession was also caught up in the radical nationalist tradition of writing and was to endure up to the 1950s, by which time bush life and its traditions were becoming economically, culturally and socially less relevant. This point was stressed by Russel Ward in The Australian Legend (1958), a study that appeared for some time to be not only the apotheosis of the bush tradition but also its swansong. During the 1970s and 1980s remote areas came to the attention of social policy makers, academics and government agencies, with the key discourse shifting to issues of isolation, lack, deficit and underdevelopment. Rural and remote areas, previously portrayed as places that change had bypassed, were now represented as places where social policy and social development had not reached. In this climate the romantic image of the Outback was increasingly tarnished by a recognition of the inequities and discrimination that existed there. In the 1970s and 1980s remote areas were seen both as generators of wealth and as sites of conflict between mining, the pastoral industry and Aboriginal land rights. New organisations and networks in this period also radically redefined the roles, interests and activities of rural women. In contrast to traditional rural women’s groups that worked for better services for women and children while supporting the patriarchal structures of rural society, these new groups were committed to women as businesswomen, activists and cultural creators.4 More recently, there have been attempts to address the perceived deficit and underdevelopment of remote and rural areas by making them economically viable and culturally enriched. The romantic images of the bush are also being resurrected by the new magicians of the media and by the tourism industry to serve new agendas and interests. But at the

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same time an emergent ‘bush voice’ is attempting to be heard above the clamour of voices from Queensland’s more densely populated coastal fringe.This chapter looks at the ways these historical shifts in perceptions about the remote West connect with literary history to shape a literary culture of the region, and also connect with the emergence of local writers intent on articulating that culture. A second defining feature of this region is its landscape. In the twentieth century the coastal and northern regions of Queensland attracted settlement and generated wealth, power and intellectual dynamism, and these regions still tend to dominate discussions of the state’s literary traditions. Nonetheless, the developing writing culture in the west looks back to a tentative but distinctive regional language with its own images and histories. The region’s unique landscape was first described by Sir Thomas Mitchell in his journal covering his exploration of central western Queensland. In 1846 he reached the Barcoo River (which he named ‘Victoria River’), where he ‘beheld downs and plains extending westward beyond the reach of vision’; to the north-west, ‘a line of trees marked the course of a river traceable to the remotest verge of the horizon’. He characterised the region as ‘the finest and most extensive pastoral region I had ever seen’.5 Most of western Queensland lies in the arid and semi-arid zone, but while the deserts of central and western Australia have inspired artists, writers and filmmakers, appreciation of Queensland’s distinctive arid interior has been more low-key and localised. Robyn O’Connell’s short story ‘Theme and Variation’ traverses a typical western Queensland landscape: All day they drove, drove through open grassland, sparse with trees, grazing emus, chicks prancing scattering, two-legged galloping across their path, into the grass, dry and hard, hard along the fine line, then endlessly, endlessly no fence. Cattle wandered, unmoved spectators easing away, kangaroos grazing, bounding, skidding, into-out-of the path of their vehicle. They were into the red country . . . Gravel gave way to red sandhills, long low sandhills. At times the sand was yellow, intensifying gradually, returning to red. Dulled grey flora flourished in a haze of yellow or purple flowers, exquisite flowers if they stopped to

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look, to stretch their legs. At their feet were fine line tracks of snakes. They could be snakes.They had to be. Lizards and birds had patterned the windblown sand. On the horizon was a faltering cloud, winging closer, flashing green. Budgerygars.6 Living in these remote and sparsely populated environments is often physically challenging and intellectually and culturally isolating. Western Queenslanders are represented, and identify themselves, as bushies, battlers and pioneers in the tradition of the nineteenth-century explorers and pastoralists who ‘opened up’ the land. They celebrate contemporary ‘pioneers’, such as the late R. M. Williams, explorer, publisher, entrepreneur and bushman extraordinaire, or Sister Anne Maree Jensen, affectionately known as the ‘Flying Nun’.7 The pioneering ethos sees the west as still in the process of being ‘opened up’ to development, and embraces newcomers. Helen Avery, a writer, bush poet and pastoralist from the Longreach area – who grew up on a farm in south-east Queensland where her world was ‘one of milkers and crops, hills and big trees’ – describes the ease with which she settled into the outback, ‘where life is dominated by sheep and cattle and dust . . . and everything is subservient to the sky . . . This is my home, I have become as much a part of this world, as it has become a part of me.’8

Watering the desert Remoteness is partly subjective, but it is not surprising that the ‘tyranny of distance’ has shaped the cultural and literary life of the west, with cultural resources limited to larger towns and regional centres. Nonetheless, from the early days of settlement, local newspapers, Mechanics’ Institutes, public libraries and Schools of Arts were established in many small towns. These schools provided libraries and reading rooms as one of their priorities and were critical in developing and maintaining a readership and encouraging a limited writing culture. Some estimates put the number of Queensland Schools of Arts as high as 290, with ‘station schools’ set up at several remote properties. According to Carole Inkster, these Schools of Arts: enjoyed a prolonged existence in Queensland in the absence of any other organisations which could offer the same range of services.They

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managed to reach, at various times in their history, some of the most remote of the Queensland populations.9 A verse published in the Charleville Times in 1896 refers to ‘our noble School of Arts / Who taught its various classes’, and asks: ‘Had its splendid library done much / To elevate the masses?’ While satirising the local political environment, this piece not only gives a taste of the cultural infrastructures in Charleville in the nineteenth century but also reveals that it had a critical and literate culture. Complementing but also competing with the Schools of Arts was the Country Women’s Association (CWA), which by the late 1920s was establishing branches in rural Queensland. One of the first tasks these local organisations set themselves was the provision of library facilities for rural women. How much the emergence of the CWA impacted on Schools of Arts is unknown, but it was around the time that branches were being established in rural centres that the School of Arts movement peaked and then went into a decline. At the same time, the public library system started supplying reading material to remote areas. The extent and success of public libraries in Queensland was, however, somewhat limited, as revealed in a submission from the Queensland Branch of the Library Association of Australia to an inquiry into Australian libraries: Where it exists at all, library service for those living in country areas varies from the merely inadequate to the abysmal . . . [and] visits to centres from remote areas are too irregular or expensive to allow systematic library use.10 If the development of a reading public was constrained by remoteness, the incubation and nourishment of literary skills were no less fettered. However, from the 1960s there emerged a government commitment to extending cultural resources to remote areas and to breaking down the barriers of distance. Romantic concepts of ‘the bush’ were subsumed by recognition of a lack of culture. Consequently, from the 1970s, arts service organisations – both government and non-government – have undertaken regional and rural cultural facilitation and cultural nourishment programs. Arts service organisations that have had a special

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interest in fostering writing in remote western Queensland are the Queensland Arts Council, Arts West and Flying Arts. Other organisations supporting writing and an oral tradition in the west include the National Outback Performing Arts, the Australian Bush Poets Association (an Australia-wide organisation dedicated to ‘rhyming poetry that talks about Australia, Australians and the Australian way of life’), the Rural Women’s Writers’ Network, and the Queensland Writers’ Centre, which encourages regional communities to build writing and publishing skills through a Regional Writing Fund. Arts Queensland also directly funds and supports writing activities through its writing programs and the Regional Arts Development Fund (established in 1990).The Central Queensland University takes as its area of responsibility the whole of the Central Queensland area from the coast to the Northern Territory border and nurtures writing through its journal, Idiom, and through the Central Queensland University Press. Regular activities such as writing workshops, writing schools, competitions and projects are sponsored by various arts services organisations; for example, Arts West has conducted writing schools from the early 1990s and Flying Arts takes teachers into remote areas. In the 1990s several projects stimulated interest in writing and reading. The first was in 1990 when a Writers’ Train set off from Brisbane along the Western Line for Charleville with a group of prominent writers, including Thea Astley, Janette Turner Hospital, Tim Winton, Nick Earls, Hugh Lunn, Komninos and Rosie Scott. The writers read from their works and presented awards for writing contests conducted by local newspapers in conjunction with the Writers’ Train at the various performances en route. A special literature camp was held for gifted students in Miles, there were numerous impromptu pub performances, and the proceeds of concerts and book sales made on the journey were donated to ongoing literary projects and events. Hugh Lunn describes the ‘magic’ of t he Writers’ Train: Children at Dulacca stood three-deep on the tiny platform and sang a song they had written about the train which named all 18 writers on board. And later at Brigalow a swarm of children dressed up as Cinderella, Snow White, Alice in Wonderland and other fairytale

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characters ambushed the train with cardboard guns and stood in the middle of the long steel line shouting above the isolated quiet, ‘Give us your books’, and ‘We want Komninos’. That was the magic of the Writers’ Train.11 In 1998 the Queensland Arts Council organised a Writers’ Safari along similar lines to the 1991 Writers’Train, with writers travelling around the state in four-wheel drive vehicles.

The ‘West’ as a literary construct In 1924, in his introduction to A Book of Queensland Verse, Professor J. J. Stable commented that ‘the verse output of Queensland . . . divides sharply into two groups – bush poetry, and town or country poetry’. Bush poetry is distinguished by its ‘virility’, a ‘passionate love of animals, especially of the horse’, and expression of the traits of the ‘English farmer or country squire’ of ‘humorous pathos, the philosophical attitude in the face of disaster, the somewhat aggressive freedom, the characteristic grumble against authority – all of which we now recognise as forming part of the characteristics of the true Australian’.12 Bush poetry, and bush literature more generally, waned during the middle years of the twentieth century, when the themes and landscapes of the coastal and metropolitan areas dominated Queensland writing. Today, however, the burgeoning literature of western Queensland frequently draws upon the traditions of bush literature established in the nineteenth century. The earliest novel with a Queensland connection was Louisa Atkinson’s Tressa’s Resolve (1872), part of which is set in western Queensland. Atkinson never visited Queensland; she relied on information from her husband, James Calvert, who had accompanied Ludwig Leichhardt on his 1844–45 expedition to Port Essington. The Queensland section of Tressa’s Resolve emphasises the remoteness, heat and harshness of the Queensland environment. The distinctiveness of western Queensland, a notion often repeated by later writers, is expressed here by the English governess Bessie Shelburn: The Queensland scenery is very unlike anything I have ever seen before. Such miles and miles of wide plains . . . The plains are so wide

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that their farthest limits melt into the horizon, and all day in the burning heat we seem to travel as if under the spell of a fairy; on and on, and yet never nearing the desired camping-place. When a tree is seen in the distance we watch it with as much eagerness as if it had life – almost human life; and then we become aware how vast the plains are by the time it takes to reach this object, visible from so far. We have witnessed the mirage – wonderful, perplexing.13 In Queensland, Bessie is put to the test, surviving shearers who threaten violence, a crippling drought, and a desperate but futile mercy dash through bushfires to save the life of her friend Adeline. Tressa’s Resolve places western Queensland on the literary map as both a distinctive landscape and a testing ground for the courage and resourcefulness of women characters. These were the qualities that attracted one of the best-selling authors of her day to set a number of her Queensland novels in the west. Rosa Praed (1851–1935) briefly visited the Bells at ‘Jimbour’ station on the Darling Downs in 1894, but never travelled further west. (Suggestively for Praed,‘Jimbour’ was the starting point in 1844 of Ludwig Leichhardt’s expedition to Port Essington.) Praed’s imaginative interest in Western Queensland began when her sister Lizzie married John Jardine and settled on Aberfoyle station in the Barcoo country south-west of Charters Towers; the western landscapes and lifestyles described in many of Praed’s novels were based on letters from her sister and stepmother.14 For many Australian as well as English readers, Praed’s novels – which dramatically evoked the extreme demands of life in the bush, but contained many inaccuracies – provided their first glimpses of outback Queensland. In Mrs Tregaskiss: A Novel of Anglo-Australian Life (1895), Clare is a cultured but neurasthenic woman, trapped in a loveless marriage to a coarse squatter, Keith Tregaskiss, and worn out by ten years on Mount Wombo station (based on ‘Aberfoyle’). Through Clare’s eyes, the landscape is dismal: Oh, those desert flats! For miles and miles they stretch, a dreary brown expanse: in summer, scorched, dried up, and glaring; in winter, swept by chill easterly winds. The loose sandy soil grows the prickly spinifex

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grass, which has leaves barbed with needle-like points and long stalks stretching along the ground and taking root at intervals to put forth more spiky tussocks. Sometimes there are patches of the horrible poison bush, and sometimes a clump of starved gidia-trees or of stunted yellow-jack. Sometimes there are no trees at all to break the dead level monotony.15 The risk of death from a lack of water or the ‘bad Bushman’ is ever present. Clare falls in love with Dr Guy Geneste, an explorer of the Gulf Country and a man for whom – like the colourful Frank Jardine, Lizzie’s brother-in-law – ‘adventure, danger, and the excitement of exploration had been the valve for his reckless courage’. Clare’s decision to leave her family for Geneste, however, has tragic consequences, when her daughter Ning becomes lost in the bush and is ‘devoured by wild beasts’.16 The tragedy is a moral turning point for both Clare and Keith Tregaskiss, who decide to stay together. In Praed’s Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land (1915), Aberfoyle station, the shearers’ strikes and the exploits of the Jardine brothers again provide the context for a novel about love and marriage.The harsh nature of life in ‘Leichardt’s [sic] Land’ (Praed’s fictional version of Queensland) exacerbates the inherent difficulties of having a marriage where there is true equality between the partners. Colin McKeith – who, like Dr Geneste, is based loosely on Frank Jardine – makes a notch on his gun barrel for every ‘black-fellow’ he kills. Lady Bridget O’Hara initially labels him an ‘invader’ and ‘aggressor’, accusing him of stealing Aboriginal land, but soon marries him and agrees to forget about his killing ways. But when he brutally punishes an adulterous Aboriginal couple on his station, Bridget leaves him.17 Devastated by the loss of his wife, McKeith eventually undergoes a limited change of heart, and the couple is reunited. Although melodramatic, and often inaccurate in historical and botanical details, Praed’s western Queensland novels offer compelling depictions of marriages torn apart under the multiple pressures of remoteness, drought, shearers’ strikes, racial tension and a diminished cultural and social life. The Scottish-born, Melbourne-educated Mary Hannay Foott (1846– 1918) was a well-known poet who edited the women’s pages of The

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Queenslander during the 1890s. She wrote of the hardships and frequent tragedy of life in outback Queensland in Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems (1885). Her title poem is a tribute to the men who set off to search for ‘pastures wide and green’ but who have been ‘by the sun and the sands devoured’ in the ‘unknown West’ – that mythical place ‘where the pelican builds her nest’.18 This poignant work was inspired by Foott’s life on her husband’s property, Dundoo station, near Thargomindah, where pelicans indeed build their nests. George Essex Evans (1863–1909), who arrived in Queensland in 1881 and spent the rest of his life in Toowoomba, is best-known for the poem ‘The Women of the West’. This paean to the women who live on the ‘frontiers of the Nation’ was first published in 1902. The ‘pioneering’ values with which Evans and others invested the bush are somewhat different from those embodied in the myths of mateship and male independence retrospectively celebrated by Vance Palmer and Russel Ward in the 1950s, most notably in the importance Evans accorded to women in the construction and maintenance of an outback community. In the final stanza he imagines their silent song: Well have we held our fathers’ creed. No call has passed us by. We faced and fought the wilderness, we sent our sons to die. And we have hearts to do and dare, and yet, o’er all the rest, The hearts that made the Nation were the Women of the West.19 And in ‘The Plains’ he describes the western landscape with the eyes of a coast-dweller – or at least from the more comfortable space of the Darling Downs – as ‘an ocean of trackless waste, untrodden and rude’.20 Ernest Favenc (1845–1908) ‘wrote of the dry areas with an unrivalled knowledge’, according to Hadgraft.21 Favenc, who was born in London and educated at Berlin and Oxford, arrived in Queensland in 1863, where he engaged in the type of pioneering activity he later lauded in The Explorers of Australia and Their Life-Work (1908). Though somewhat better known for his accounts of living and working in the coastal tropics, he had considerable experience of the west as well. In 1878 he led an expedition from Blackall to Darwin to find a transcontinental railway route, and in the 1880s he undertook an expedition to the Gulf Country.

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His knowledge of Western Queensland also derived from working on stations between 1865 and 1879. Favenc’s outback novels include The Secret of the Australian Desert (1895), a lost-race romance in which a group searching for Ludwig Leichhardt discovers an unknown non-Aboriginal race rich in gold. In his book of poems, Voices of the Desert (1905), he noted that the ‘striking feature’ of the Australian desert is the absolute and utter stillness that prevails. If there is such a thing as darkness which can be felt, then the Australian desert possesses a silence which can be heard, so much does it oppress the intruder into these solitudes . . . A land such as this, with its great loneliness, its dearth of life, and its enshrouding atmosphere of awe and mystery, has a voice of its own, distinctly different from that of the ordinary Australian bush.22 The qualities identified by Favenc – ‘stillness’, ‘loneliness’ and ‘dearth of life’ – have powerful resonance in the work of later writers, such as Ernestine Hill in The Great Australian Loneliness (1937). Such a characterisation of the land, however, is challenged by writers equally receptive to the ‘magic’ of outback Queensland but more intimately at home there. Alice Monkton Duncan-Kemp (1901–88), who was born in Charleville and grew up on her parents’ cattle station, ‘Mooraberrie’, near Windorah in the Channel Country, wrote several non-fiction books based on her experiences of the desert and her reflections on Aboriginal people and their culture.23 Her first book, Our Sandhill Country: Nature and Man in South-Western Queensland (1933), was re-issued in 1961 as Our Channel Country. Where Strange Paths Go Down (1958) and Where Strange Gods Call (1968) also evoke the western landscape and the traditions and legends of Aboriginal people. Duncan-Kemp wants her readers to appreciate that the Channel Country is ‘very arid’ but ‘not barren’: Give it moisture, and the whole region is transformed. The desert of yesterday blossoms as a flower garden today. Red and white sandhills are strewn with vivid bouquets; orange-yellow, rose-red, imperceptibly blend with the palest lavender, pink and buttercup; patches of Wild Almond bushes rub shoulders with acres and acres of blue flax-plant

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flowers and Wild Turpentine, whose bell-shaped blossoms change from white to lavender as they grow upon the thick-set shrub. The landscape is one riot of colour; the air heavy with scent and vocal with the droning of bees and other insects . . . There is no desert so barren that some form of plant life cannot adapt itself and not only survive but flourish under trying conditions.24 Duncan-Kemp’s acute and sensitive studies of the Channel Country are fine examples of nature writing, and she also deserves a wider readership for her early advocacy of Aboriginal rights, in particular her opposition to the policy of assimilation. Novelist Dorothy Cottrell (1902–57), who spent some of her childhood on her uncles’ stations ‘Elmina’ near Charleville and ‘Ularunda’ near Morven, also located significant parts of her works in Western Queensland. The Singing Gold (1928), which was discussed earlier by Christopher Lee in this volume, concludes with a pilgrimage by the narrator, Joan, to the Gulf Country – the ‘Plains of the Singing Gold’. Earth Battle (1930), published in the United States (where Cottrell was living at the time) as Tharlane, is also set in an area of south-west Queensland characterised as the ‘outlands of the earth’, where the land defeats those who attempt to master it: A land this, vast, arid, resistant of men, where life was fiercely simple, man’s joys the primal ones of breath and food and common speech, his agonies the primal pains of thirst and hunger, heat and cold and death. Complexities were not; men lived and fought in the red dust on the immense hard breast of the earth.25 The protagonist of Earth Battle – Old H.B., ‘one o’ the worst men in Queensland’ – is obsessed with his quest to ‘own and master’ Tharlane, a property that has defeated all its previous tenants. The landscape is depicted as both inhospitable and uniquely beautiful, with ‘grass seas’ and ‘a shimmering beauty’. Tharlane again defeats the would-be conqueror, who is forced to acknowledge the futility of battling the earth. Although the land can be fecund – a ‘gold and green and grey waste of flowers and grasses that had sweltered and breathed in the sun, and mated with

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the sun, and answered his caresses with fierce, careless productivity’ – a bushfire ultimately destroys Old H.B. and everything he had built over the years. Henry Lamond (1885–1969), who was born in the Gulf Country and worked on various stations in western Queensland as a young man, achieved both local and international fame for his enormous output of outback novels and stories. These include Tooth and Talon:Tales of the Australian Wild (1934), Amathea: The Story of a Horse (1937), From Tariaro to Ross Roy (1943), Brindle Royalist (1947), White Ears the Outlaw (1949), Big Red (1953), The Manx Star (1954), The Red Ruin Mare (1958) and Sheep Station (1959). His stories are part fact, part fiction; as he notes in his author’s note to Big Red: ‘The material for this work has been gathered over many years in many areas; in the saddle, at shooters’ camps, in station huts, on pub verandahs, and around camp-fires.’26 Most of his books include a glossary of bush terms and expressions, showing the importance to Lamond of that ‘bush’ language. Heroes of his books are bush characters and animals – horses, cattle, ’roos, dogs and dingoes. Elizabeth Webb was born on her parents’ cattle and sheep station near Cunnamulla in 1910 and educated in Toowoomba and Brisbane. In the 1930s she became well known for her national ABC program, Speaking Personally, and in the 1940s she aired her controversial, ‘progressive’ views in a weekly column for the Sunday Mail in Brisbane.Webb also published short stories, plays, non-fiction works and several novels. Her novel Into the Morning (1958) is set in western Queensland, Brisbane, Cherbourg and the Gold Coast. Narrated in the first person by the ‘half-caste’Toddy Vine, the son of an English boundary rider and an Aboriginal cook, the first part of the book is set in western Queensland: Toddy grows up on Wallam Station, in the town of Cunnamulla, and then at the Peranda River Camp outside Cunnamulla; following an accident, he is the first ‘coloured’ to be brought by the Flying Doctor to Charleville; later, he lives with tribal Aborigines. But nowhere does Toddy find acceptance. In the words of the cover blurb,Toddy ‘was born into the uneasy no-man’sland between two worlds’.27 He finds a way out of this dilemma only when he moves to the more accepting environments of Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Into the Morning presents assimilation as Toddy’s way to a better future. He eventually becomes a successful builder in Brisbane’s

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southern suburbs and has a liberating love affair with a white woman, but the novel’s advocacy of breeding out colour makes uncomfortable reading today.Webb’s support for A. P. Elkin’s theories contrasts strongly with the anti-assimilationist stance of her near contemporary, Duncan-Kemp. Voss (1957) by Patrick White (1912–90) draws loosely on the last journey of Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared somewhere in western Queensland after setting out from Cogoon Station on the Darling Downs in 1848.28 In the novel, Johann Ulrich Voss’s expeditionary party visits a modest farm at the outer limits of settlement on the Darling Downs, then, with two Aboriginal guides, sets out for the uncharted lands to the west. Like Mary Hannay Foott’s horsemen in ‘Where the Pelican Builds’, they never return. White’s novel takes the European explorers to the limits of their physical, psychological and spiritual endurance, challenged by the land itself and contact with Aboriginal culture. White shows the acute breakdown of language and verbal communication in the Europeans’ encounters with Aboriginal people, and the spiritual transfiguration of Voss following exposure to Aboriginal spirituality. This novel, which is notoriously challenging to readers, attempts to rethink Australian identity by taking Europeans away from the coast and into the centre of an unknown land. Janette Turner Hospital, another writer with an international reputation, also makes a compellingly original contribution to the literary representation of the West. Her sixth novel, Oyster (1996), is set in the mythical Outer Maroo, a drought-stricken town that has ‘kept itself off maps’ and where there is ‘nothing but acacia scrub and saltbush scribbles against the red earth’. Outer Maroo – ‘NW of Quilpie and Eromanga, or SW of Longreach and Windorah, or E of Birdsville’ – might be no more or less real than a heat mirage. Its population of eighty-seven is made up of bushies and Christian fundamentalists, until a cult messiah, the Bible-quoting Oyster, arrives like a prophet out of the desert. Oyster recruits born-again backpackers to work in his opal mines, ‘preparing for a new heaven and a new earth’ which will begin in the year 2000, but the narrator, Jess Hyde, records the underside of Oyster’s vision: mysterious disappearances, murder and rape. As both the drought and Oyster’s madness escalate, the anticipated Armageddon arrives when Oyster’s opal reef is mysteriously blown up, and the town of Outer Maroo is destroyed by the ensuing fire.29

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An Aboriginal woman, Ethel, is the custodian of the longer history of the region, and she alone stays to reclaim her land when Outer Maroo is destroyed: ‘This is my country here, my tree. My mob’ll come home now, any day now, you’ll see. They’ll hear on the bush telegraph, they’ll all start showing up from Bourke.’ Rain, she says, is also finally on the way.30 In this novel, Turner Hospital explores the violence and racism of white Australian culture, but also that culture’s fragile hold on the land, and its susceptibility to false prophets. Her sources include Hazel McKellar’s Matya-Mundu: A History of the Aboriginal People and South West Queensland (1984) and personal accounts by McKellar and other Aboriginal women.31 At the same time, the novel draws profoundly on European religious and literary traditions, from the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Revelation to Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll: like Voss, the allusiveness of Oyster adds new layers of meaning to Western Queensland as a literary landscape.

An itinerant or transient view of western Queensland In early constructions of Australia, western Queensland was represented as a space to be crossed. Up to the 1890s land-hungry settlers passed through it on their northward treks. Later stockmen, following the stock routes, transected its vastness. Exploring and droving tracks overlapped. Many of these travellers recorded their experiences in letters, diaries and journals, such as Sir Thomas L. Mitchell’s Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia (1848), A. C. and F. T. Gregory’s Journals of Australian Exploration (1884), Gordon Buchanan’s Packhorse and Waterhole: With the First Overlanders to the Kimblerleys (1933) and William Landsborough’s Journal (1862).32 Western Queensland’s history is closely linked through these travels and travellers’ tales to the Northern Territory, the Gulf Country and Far North Queensland. Western Queensland becomes, from this period, linked into the mystique of the Outback and the North. The Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame holds an outstanding example of ‘visitor literature’: Hugh Hamilton’s ‘Diary of a Good Young Man

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out West’ was written while the young British immigrant was droving sheep in central western Queensland in 1885. Hamilton, an observant young man (and also a competent sketcher and watercolourist), provides word sketches of the travel from Brisbane by steamship to Rockhampton, by train and Cobb & Co. coach to Blackall, and then on to the property where Hamilton and his drover mate were to take delivery of the sheep – a mob of over 10,000 – to be moved out to Hughenden. Hamilton stayed with the droving team as far as Winton, for a period of about six weeks. After this he took off on foot, on the ‘wallaby’, working his way back to the rail terminus for the Townsville rail line and then by steamship to Brisbane, where he arrived some six months after his departure on his western adventure. Besides detailed observations about droving, Hamilton’s diary provides historical material about outback towns, station life and ‘tramping’ in western Queensland. Hamilton’s writing is descriptive rather than reflective. He is an observer who remains largely invisible to the reader, yet this is an important historical document that carefully details rural working conditions, outback landscapes and descriptions of remote western towns. His diary, although not published, was obviously written for an audience (probably overseas), with explanations, detailed descriptions of processes such as drafting and branding, and character sketches of his travelling and work companions. His style is terse yet highly readable, as this extract from 25 March 1895 illustrates. The two companions had just left the small town of Beta and were heading towards Blackall in a Cobb & Co. coach: Cobb & Co. is what the advertisements call a ‘household word’ in Australia – their coaches to be found almost everywhere. The coaches are very strong concerns as they have to be considering the country some of them have to go over. They are hung on very strong leather springs and in rough country roll about like boats in rough weather – rolling and pitching something ‘considerable’ . . . Country very dry, wanting rain badly. Very poor sandy country between Beta and Blackall. Fresh changes of horses every fifteen miles. Stoppages for breakfast and dinner, such as they are. About twenty miles from Blackall you come upon the open plains (Alice Downs) as far as you can see all open and, just dividing earth and sky, a narrow belt of trees.

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It was just sunset when we arrived on the plain and the sight was very pretty – a glorious sunset and the novelty of open country which I had never seen before. Today’s itinerants are more likely to be administrative workers or teachers doing a stint in a rural or remote town, or members of the ‘grey army’ who travel around Australia at a leisurely pace after retirement.

Bush literature: ballads, verse, poetry and yarns Western Queensland as a literary space often overlaps, as suggested above, with representations of ‘the Outback’. However, in The Australian Legend Russel Ward points out that in the 1890s ‘Bulletin writers and others constantly remarked that Queensland was the most “Australian” and the most nationalistic of all the colonies’. Ward also credits the Bulletin with being ‘easily the most important single medium by which the “bush” ethos was popularised’, in particular through the work of Paterson and Lawson.33 The connection of parts of western Queensland with the Bulletin writers is embodied in the ‘Waltzing Matilda’ myth, a connection that has spawned a highway, a heritage centre and a festival, as well as an ongoing fascination with the bush ballad. There are conflicting versions of the origins of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, but it is generally accepted that ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864–1941) wrote the words in 1895, at Dagworth Station near Winton, after Christina Macpherson played him a version of the Scottish folk tune ‘Craigielea’. Paterson also provided a memorable romantic image of Western Queensland in ‘Clancy of the Overflow’: In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving ‘down the Cooper’ where the Western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know. Cliff Hanna suggests that the term ‘bush ballad’ is ‘an elastic term in the hands of the Bulletin rhymers’. He also argues that this form of ballad declined after the Great War, and that its history in the twentieth century ‘is that of an escapist rural ethos enshrined in an urban race’.34 This summary dismissal ignores the popular appeal of this literary form,

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especially in rural areas. The contemporary bush ballad expresses resistance to change and nostalgia for values and ways of life under threat from urbanisation, modernisation and globalisation. At the same time, this outback culture is incorporated into, and becomes a carrier for, the very forces it sets out to oppose and resist. Indicative of this re-emergence of interest in bush verse is the growth of publishing houses and performing vehicles and venues for the genre. In 1972 the Winton Tourist Promotion Association inaugurated the Bronze Swagman award for bush poetry. All entries in the competition are published in the annual The Bronze Swagman Book of Bush Verse, and award winners have come from across Australia. The legacy of the bush ballad is evident in titles, themes and language. Taking the 1997 edition of The Bronze Swagman, for example, some of the titles speak directly to the writings of the 1890s balladists: ‘On the Wallaby’ (T. Muir from Picola, Victoria) or ‘Paterson’s Ghosts’ (Donald Crane, Toowong, Queensland). The themes also evoke the bush legend: ‘Mates’ (Marco Gliori, from Warwick, Queensland), ‘Mateship’ (Muriel Courtenay, Bundaberg, Queensland) or ‘My Mate, Billy [billy can]’ (T. Muir, Picola, Victoria). More explicitly, the use of coded language reiterates much of the earlier period. For example, take the first verse of T. Muir’s ‘On the Wallaby’: Roll up your swags, and rattle your dags, we’re heading for the wallaby track. Don’t stir the fire bright, we’ve no need of the light, we may not be coming back. Say your goodbyes, wipe the tears from your eyes, and pack your billy and tea. For we’ll waltz matilda, around our Australia, for we’ve the spirit to roam and be free.35 The Bronze Swagman poets range in genre from lyric to ballad, in style from thoughtful to humorous, and some also pick up on the more robust vernacular bush verse of a school of writers that includes the controversial Richard Magoffin. There is a ‘blokey’ masculinity of tone to many of the bush ballads, bush verses and bush yarns, along with a nostalgic

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yearning for a past era. Ray Mobbs of Pittsworth, Queensland, articulates these sentiments in ‘Looking Back’: Men don’t walk the dusty tracks (that side of life is gone) Now they join the dole queue instead of moving on. Mechanised cowboys do the droving ‘where the western drovers go’ Entombed forever in bitumen are the tracks of Cobb & Co.36 Yet despite this masculine tone, women too are drawn to the genre, as entries in the Bronze Swagman competition testify. In 1974 there was nearly equal representation of men and women entrants, but in 1997 male entrants outnumbered women, possibly because women were moving into other genres. An increase in children’s entries has seen the instigation of a ‘Little Swaggies’ award. Although bush poetry has a reputation for doggerel and is often looked down on as ‘low culture’, many of the entries in the Bronze Swagman competition reveal a lyricism and a sensitive and sophisticated language and structure. In 1990 the National Outback Performing Arts (NOPA) was inaugurated in Longreach and established its own annual competitions. With the support of the Queensland government’s Regional Arts Development Fund, NOPA has also published two collections of verse, Bush Voices (1995) and Voices West (1998). As the foreword to Voices West notes, the ten poets represented have different voices ‘but all ten share the experience of living in Western Queensland’: ‘The poets all look out on the vast rolling plains of Mitchell grass, look up at the same endless sky of blue and diamond-bright stars. Their poems have the flavour of bush traditions.’37 Bush humour, bush life, local names, vernacular language, horses, stock and stock work and landscapes of drought and endless plains inform the themes and language, but overlaying many of the poems is nostalgia for another era, for people who have passed away, and for experiences of the past. Mark Kleinschmidt in ‘A Ringer’s Rites’ expresses this with the voice of an old bushman: Fall in step and yarn a while, Take notice of the track,

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One day you’ll need to pass this way, I’ll not be coming back.38 Dale Leard, born in Charleville, was raised on bush poetry and is a founding member of the Charleville Bush Balladeers. Her poem ‘Portrait of a Bushman’ concludes nostalgically: ‘Future generations will never know or understand, / Just how unique and special is Australia’s outback man.’39 Similarly, Danny Blunt’s ‘Old Timer’ once ‘[k]ept alive the dream of this nation’, but now the nation has forgotten him: with his ‘self pride’ gone, ‘there’s nothing to do, / Except keep drinking pots ’til last call.’40 Helen Avery too expresses nostalgia for a way of life that is gone: I’d like to smell my horse’s sweat and leather, And feel the good dirt crumble in my hands, And read the sky and clouds to tell the weather, And walk again upon my hard-earned land . . . . . . seems only yesterday, you know.41 Karen Emmott from Charleville, a founding member of NOPA, has been writing poetry since her primary school days. A poem about the death of her grandfather concludes wistfully: ‘I wish I’d listened, really listened, when Grandpa shared his stories.’42 Perhaps the most impressive and interesting of the contemporary bush balladists is Jack Drake. His wide range of subjects and tones, his convincing command of a traditional Australian colloquial vernacular and his technical skill and versatility show that bush poetry is very much a living art. His most recent book, The Cattle Dog’s Revenge, the title of one of his best-known comic ballads, was published by Central Queensland University Press in 2003. Drake is an excellent performer of his own work, at folk festivals, the Brisbane Exhibition, meetings of the Australian Bush Poets Association, and many other venues. He recites from memory rather than reading his selections, and, as his mentor Ted Egan says, it helps that he looks and sounds the part:

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Henry Lawson and C. J. Dennis would have written poems about Jack, for he has that spare bushman’s frame, the laconic look that quickly sorts out the idiots, the easy speech, the uncompromisingly Australian colloquialisms. After all this it comes as a surprise to learn that Drake was born in New Zealand, a fact that Ted Egan insists is an advantage rather than the reverse, because Drake sees things that Egan himself misses.43 Rather than using the ballad style and form to express an uncritical nostalgia for the old days and old ways (as some contemporary bush poets do), Drake uses it as the vehicle for a certain kind of ‘common sense’ approach to social questions as modern as multiculturalism (‘The Tourist Rush’), family breakdown (‘The Sins of the Father’), reconciliation (‘Australia’s Heroes’), alcoholism (‘Running Board Mick’), environmental degradation (‘Brisbane View’) and animal rights (‘Possum’). And proud though he is of his genuine continuities in voice and style with the bush balladists of the 1890s, the common sense of the early twenty-first century is not the common sense of the late nineteenth century. His views on all these matters are well to the rational and respectful left of the political spectrum, and would give little comfort to the reactionary right. Such views are smuggled in, as it were, under cover of a familiar anti-elitism, anti-trendiness, a touch of anti-intellectualism, lots of laconic Schadenfreude, an obviously very deeply felt respect for the Anzac tradition (of the ‘Don’t go to war’ variety, for example ‘Dawn Parade’), a love of outback culture and people, and, of course, the many explicit references to Lawson, Paterson, Lance Skuthorpe and ‘Breaker’ Morant. Drake would probably object to being portrayed as a Trojan Horse for delivering left-liberal social views to the bush, but his strategy, whether conscious or not, probably has a better prospect of success than some of the less savoury brands of populism. Drake’s rollicking bush narratives (the bulk of his work) are difficult to exemplify in short quotations, but the following short piece, ‘Brisbane View’, though somewhat atypical, gives a sense of his work’s quieter qualities: Old sandstone coyly nestled in lee on brooding towers. Engines drumming, tyres humming constant as the hours.

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Cranes like grasping fingers of modern man’s unrest. River tamed and concrete framed, flows turgid from the west. Prehistoric silhouettes of ancient Bunya pines. Towers stark in light and dark, advance in ordered lines. Muted hues of concrete swiftly crowding out the greens. Palm and fig survive the dig of ravenous machines. Remnant scraps of nature left haphazard as by chance. Man’s ideal in block and steel unceasing in advance. Encapsulated population boxed and packaged neat, staying sane while there remains one tree across the street.44

Historical writing: local histories, autobiographies and biographies Local histories and life writing form a large part of the writing effort in the west. This output can be divided loosely into antiquarian or celebratory works on the one hand, and academic or professional histories on the other. Recently, however, hybrid works have begun to appear: local histories and life writing are now likely to include mixes of oral history, genealogy, personal reminiscences and academic research. Antiquarian or celebratory works are typically written by enthusiastic and concerned individuals who were (or are) amateur historians. Where published, these histories are generally produced as commissioned works or to record a past threatened by progress, development and change. Moreover, they are generally celebratory in tone, often localised around an institution such as the local school or church, or a town or city, and tend to focus on names and leading individuals or families, places (properties, land holdings, landmarks) and important events in the life of the organisation or community involved. Such histories are often unreferenced or inadequately referenced. They address the local reader with an interest in family or place, or readers seeking background information presented in a popular style. A chronological approach is characteristic of this mode of history writing. There is also a body of unpublished or self-published material, much of it relating to family histories and ‘property’ histories and much of it contained in family papers. An example of a self-published family history, related in verse, is Joy Baillie’s Let It Be

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Recorded: A Family’s Journey through Outback Queensland (1977). Baillie tells the story of the purchase by her parents (Herbert and Thelma Hickmott) of an old Cobb & Co. coach in 1931 and the family’s journey from Surat to Richmond.45 Another example of this genre of family history is Heartbreak Corner (1998), Fleur Lehane’s story of the pioneer families of South-West Queensland.46 Very much a personal account of the family’s connection with the Duracks and the intimate details of family life and of the station properties ‘Ray’ and ‘Terachy’, the book gives a woman’s perspective on outback life. Western Queensland abounds with local histories that fall into the category of commemorative histories – of regions, towns, schools, churches, stations or families. Centennial histories have been popular over the last fifty years. Local histories deposited with the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame are representative of the extent of this genre. They include histories of the towns of Winton, Windorah and Morella, and the Winton, Longreach, Muttaburra and Tambo schools. Richard Magoffin’s exploration of the ‘Waltzing Matilda’ legend in Waltzing Matilda:The Story behind the Legend, and the numerous journal articles and media presentations he has produced around this theme, cannot be ignored: these slip between myth making, history and bush lore, and Magoffin’s lobbying and writing perpetuate the bush legend.47 A more academic approach emerged when professional historians became interested in local history. Their histories tend to address a narrower, more specialised audience – mostly fellow academic historians – and consequently they often centre on historical issues or specific themes; they turn to new sources, or they apply various theoretical frameworks to smaller fields of study in order to draw conclusions about broader arenas. In the 1970s this more professional approach to history writing was introduced when Malcolm I. Thomis, commissioned to write a history for the Shire of Blackall, produced Pastoral Country (1979).48 Since then there have been a number of academic histories. Angela Moffat has documented the history of the Graziers’ Association and of Longreach.49 Isabel Hoch has written histories of Barcaldine, Alpha and Jericho, and the construction of the Rockhampton to Longreach railway line.50 Jan L’Estrange has documented the history of Tambo in great detail, with recourse to an extraordinarily wide range of sources, in Belle of the Barcoo:

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Tambo (1996).51 Peter Forrest’s A Rush for Grass (1988), although a history of the town of Ilfracombe and the four large stations that originally made up the entire shire, does in its first chapters set the local history within the context of the development of the wool industry in Australia.52 Claire Wagner’s Frontier Town: Charleville 1865–1901 (1991) is another well-researched and well-documented local history.53 Many of these writers allude to their interest in family history research as laying the foundations for the development of their history writing. The popularity of genealogy has stimulated rural women, especially those with a tertiary education, and sometimes teaching or journalistic experience, to turn their pens to the production of local histories. Another collection that takes up oral histories alongside literary texts to provide a cross-section of ‘authentic voices of the past’ of ‘Capricornia Queensland’ – a region that takes in both the coastal and the inland regions of Central Queensland – is Sin, Sweat and Sorrow: The Making of Capricornia Queensland 1840s–1940s (1993), edited by Liz Huf, Lorna McDonald and David Myers. Themes covered include some typical of, or related to,Western Queensland: the shearers’ strike, bush legends, cattle duffing and the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre. It is, as the editors comment, ‘not a history in itself, but rather a “starting point” for further reading, study or research’.54 Its innovative use of oral material also connects with the oral tradition of bush poetry and the emergence of Aboriginal writing from the West.

New voices of the west Balladists and bush poets typify the new voices of the West retelling old tales, but there is also the new voice of the creative writer – often difficult to distinguish from the bush poet and often penned by the same writer as he or she shifts between moods and styles. Helen Avery, the female winner in 1997 of the Australian Bush Poetry Championships, reveals a passion for language, and a sensitivity to it, in a selection of poems published in The Outer Edge (1997).55 Verses range from passionate and delicate love poems to self-confessed ‘doggerel’. Mark Kleinschmidt also moves easily between yarn and lyric verse. Women are increasingly appearing as writers and oral performers, and tend to move between genres. Historian Isabel Hoch, for example,

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has written two romantic novels set in outback Queensland, No Tomorrow (1997) and One More Moon (1997).56 There is a sense of fluidity and experimentation in women’s writing. Moreover, as one commentator remarked, there is a pressing need for women’s stories to be told, as ‘the men’s stories have been told through work and industrial stories’. No account of the writing of western Queensland can fail to mention the man known as the ‘Cunnamulla storyteller’, Herb Wharton.Working in the tradition of the bush yarn, Wharton draws on years of experience, ranging from horse-breaking and rodeo riding to meatworker and builder, in his poetry, short stories, book reviews and essays. Wharton’s first novel, Unbranded (1992), presents an Aboriginal perspective on the pastoral industry. He later published Cattle Camp: Murrie Drovers and Their Stories (1994), Where Ya’ Been, Mate? (1996), a collection of stories of the city and the bush, and Yumba Days (1999), which describes growing up in a settlement (yumba) on the fringes of town.57 When recounting the stories of characters such as Diamond Jim or Rainbow Jack (Where Ya’ Been, Mate?), he captures a sense of an Aboriginal voice. Wharton’s quietly unassuming yet perceptive comments relay a considered view of life, of black / white relations, and of living in a white world, including his experience of university life.

Conclusion Writing in the west is currently undergoing changes, as new technologies expand the opportunities for writers to develop their skills and repertoires and offer fresh avenues for their work. Contemporary Western Queensland writers are testing their voices, taking chances and experimenting. They are making their presence, their views and their region known and knowable.

PART 4: North Queensland

Warm Words: North Q ueensland Writing Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins Despite the failure of attempts to form a separate state, the idea of North Queensland as a distinctive region has existed powerfully almost from first settlement.While advocates of Separation have not succeeded in negotia­ ting either boundaries or a capital, the political failure has undoubtedly added force to the idea. The purpose of this brief survey is to investigate complexities inherent in the idea of North Queensland by surveying the prose and poetry produced by that as yet not fully defined geographical unit. North Queensland is not unique among the regions of the world in performing, so to speak, as a character in much of the writing set here. Its climate, however, together with its distances and sparse settlement, deter­ mines the physical and psychic lifestyle of its people more rigorously than happens in more settled temperate regions. Unlike the pervasive intru­ sion of New York or Paris, or even an Australian city, North Queensland appears to provide its setting unobtrusively, before impacting on the tiny people who have crept into its scenery. The region as a separate entity is a construct of European settlers, built over but never replacing a passionate and sacred Indigenous engage­ ment with the land that has continued uninterrupted from ancient times. In relation to this tradition, the literature discussed in this chapter is an uninvited, relatively new form of cultural construction. From the mid­twentieth century Indigenous writers have made an important

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contribution to this European art form. However, since Queensland’s Indigenous literature is the subject of a separate chapter in this volume, the focus here is on the idea of North Queensland that non­Indigenous writing has produced.

Tall tales and true: narratives of the North No form of writing has contributed more to the representation of North Queensland than long prose narratives. Some are works of questionable literary status that nevertheless attracted a wide readership, while oth­ ers are engaging literary productions that deserve more attention from readers and critics than they have received.Together they invite interpre­ tation as an index to evolving attitudes to regional life held by northern residents, visitors and outsiders. This survey traces a mainstream of cultural construction initiated in reports by explorers and pioneers. By 1900, travel writing and autobiog­ raphy had subsumed exploration narratives, but pioneering fiction and reminiscences continued in a strong publishing stream into the twenty­ first century. These genres established conventions from which some texts departed or against which they revolted. The conventions include a focus on the accomplishments of white males in the roles of explorers, pastoralists, miners and police; white supremacist assumptions; an uncriti­ cal acceptance of entrepreneurial values; and an unexamined though at times defensive belief in the rightness or inevitability of colonisation. Aberrant texts began to appear at the beginning of the twentieth century in the writings of two fringe­dwellers, E. J. Banfield and Jack McLaren, and in the mid­century the publication of records by early female pio­ neers expanded conceptions of pioneering as an outdoors male activity. Finally, life writing of the 1980s and 1990s was to recreate the idea of North Queensland with a sophistication rarely seen before. Overland exploration narratives, 1844–99 The substantial leather­bound volumes in which explorers of north­ eastern Australia published the journal­based narratives of their expeditions epitomise the confidence of an imperial culture. This same confidence manifests in the stiff generic conventions to which the authors adhere: their clear prose styles; their mimicry of bureaucratic

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or military reporting; their scientific erudition; their application of Latin nomenclature to species of animals and plants, minerals, soils and geological formations; and the measurements that they derived from a developing technology of chronometers, sextants, barometers and ther­ mometers. Simon Ryan has documented the tragic over­writing of ancient Aboriginal knowledges entailed in the invention of Australia according to pre­existing European patterns of thought.1 Yet the widespread acclaim accorded expedition leaders as heroic con­ querors and originating authors of north­east Australia was challenged from the beginning by a recognition of white men’s vulnerability to the hazards presented by a resistant landscape and its Indigenous people. The opposing impulses of assertion and vulnerability evident throughout the exploration period became entrenched in the imagination of Euro­ pean settlers, particularly of white men, in what was to become North Queensland. Explorers’ narratives of the region nevertheless vary widely. In jour­ neying from the Darling Downs to Port Essington, where he arrived on 17 December 1845, Leichhardt was the first European to traverse the tropical north­east, and his Journal became the region’s alpha­text.2 It challenges generic conventions in its pervasive, often disinterested, scien­ tific curiosity, its generous acknowledgment of patrons and friends, and its emotional candour. Another key text was the Narrative of William Carron, one of only three survivors of Edmund Kennedy’s expedition to Cape York in 1848.3 In detailing his party’s harassment and humilia­ tion by tribesmen at Weymouth Bay, Carron cemented the impression of the northern settlers’ vulnerability that had been initiated by Leich­ hardt’s description of the fatal attack on his party on the other side of the Cape. A third major exponent of North Queensland exploration, George Elphinstone Dalrymple, recorded his central role in the settling of the coast between Port Denison (Bowen) and the Daintree River in con­ sciously literary Reports and Narratives that substitute romantic enthusiasm for Leichhardt’s and Carron’s scientific erudition.4 Dalrymple’s view of Aboriginal people was corrupted, as Leichhardt’s and Carron’s were not, by prejudice and sensationalism. Finally, in May 1864 the young Frank and Alex Jardine set out from Rockhampton, driving cattle for use at the new port of Somerset at the tip of Cape York where their father was

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Police Magistrate. In recording the slaughter of Aboriginal people in a congratulatory tone, the Jardine Narrative epitomises that adulation of masculine accomplishment in taming ‘the wild north’ which, while it often featured in the region’s literature, was not always so unqualified or so naive.5 North Queensland exploration journals continued to be published into the 1870s and 1880s. In 1872 William Hann explored the central peninsula between Mount Surprise and the Endeavour River. Because he was a representative early settler who first found traces of gold at the Palmer River, his Diary and Report endured in the region’s histori­ cal consciousness.6 Other exploration narratives emulated Dalrymple by mingling facts with literary adornments and fiction. The editor Gresley Lukin began a tradition of such writings in the Queenslander when he sponsored a transcontinental expedition to survey a railway line between Brisbane and Port Darwin. ‘An Explorer’s Diary’ by the expedition leader, Ernest Favenc, was printed between October 1878 and July 1879. Favenc’s humorous attitude challenged generic conventions for the first time: I like sticking in readings of the thermometer; it looks scientific, and I have noticed that in all the late journals of exploring expeditions that they do it. Now I am anxious to do the thing properly; I want to keep up the model of the bold explorer after the latest model.7 Christie Palmerston’s Diary of a Track-Cutting Expedition from the Johnstone River to Herberton,8 aptly described by Paul Savage as ‘long, detailed, observant and articulate’,9 followed in September and October 1882. Palmerston was a colourful figure who roamed the bush armed to the teeth, accompanied, unlike other explorers, only by Aborigines and Islanders. By perpetuating stereotypes of Indigenous people, his Diary reflected a further hardening in northern settlers’ racial attitudes. Archibald Meston belatedly claimed the status of an explorer when narratives of his expeditions to Bellenden Ker were published in the Queenslander between May and December 1889.10 While these record fauna, flora, climate, distances, sea levels and terrain, they depart from convention in including multiple quotations from British and American

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poetry, hyperbolic landscape descriptions, and imitations of imperial adventure writing. The eccentric superstructure that Meston erected on earlier journalistic experiments by Favenc and Palmerston demonstrated conclusively that the rigid bureaucratic fashioning of northern explora­ tion narratives was, like most traditions, subject to revision over time. Pioneering tales, 1863–1920 The content and goals of North Queensland’s tradition of pioneering lit­ erature proved to be exceptionally consistent. From 1863, when George Windsor Earl published his Handbook for Colonists in Tropical Australia, to the printing in 2003 of Choat and Marinuzzi’s Italian Pioneers in the Innisfail District, volumes narrating the settlement of the North have issued in a steady flow that shows no sign of abating.11 Pioneering tales are an offshoot of explorers’ learned narratives, which they often mediate for a popular readership. A third of Edward Palmer’s Early Days in North Queensland (1903) is taken up with retelling north­ ern exploration narratives, while much of the remainder records the establishment of stations like ‘Canobie’ on the Cloncurry River, which Palmer took up in 1863. The author’s motives for writing typify the genre in being as much ideological as commercial: It is well that some one should [record a few of those early steps of set­ tlement], and one who has experienced the vicissitudes of Northern pioneer life, with its calls on active endurance and its ceaseless worries would not be altogether unfit to note the progress of a great move­ ment, or to place on record some of the events that helped to make up the early life of Queensland, however unqualified the writer might be, in a literary sense.12 The amateurism claimed here is another common feature of these writings, which express ordinary people’s attitudes and assumptions. The isolated settlers who struggled for years to establish holdings unsurprisingly pro­ duced less polished accounts than the explorers, who were rewarded with the fame and status of adventurers for short­lived expeditions. In view of the northern settlers’ crude conditions and largely disre­ garded existence, it is also not surprising that their writings extended a

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purpose basic to explorers’ narratives, of guiding migrants to develop and ‘civilise’ the region. Explorers’ fictionalising of grazing lands13 escalated in promotional works by both settlers and visitors. When Earl published his Handbook, settlement had advanced northwards only as far as Port Denison, but he drew on Leichhardt’s and Carron’s journals for descrip­ tions that persuaded British readers to migrate to the region. In Four Years in Queensland (1870), Edward B. Kennedy similarly assured readers that the colony’s financial setbacks of the late 1860s were temporary, and advised them on arrival to take the steamer north, so that they might feel, when ‘commencing to reap the fruit of their labours, that they were among the first Pioneers’.14 In fact, the narratives of these first pioneers record the intense physi­ cal exertion and anxious planning needed to overcome the disadvantages of distance and climate. Joseph Hann, father of the explorer William, and his two sons took up pastoral properties in 1861. Joseph drowned three years later while attempting to swim the notoriously dangerous Burdekin River. His bald diary entries record fever, ague and colds suf­ fered by family members, alternating droughts and floods, worries over straying and dying stock, exhausting travel on horseback and by coastal steamer, the breaking­down of vehicles, banking and legal problems, and difficulties in erecting dwellings and providing furniture.15 Robert Gray’s Reminiscences of India and North Queensland, narrating a half­century’s work on Hughenden station, documents similar preoccupations in more accomplished prose.16 Writings by Palmer, Hann and Gray are reticent or defensive about settlers’ violent reprisals against Aborigines for stock­stealing and similar offences, but often record attacks on whites by Aborigines. Palmer, who claimed expertise, wrote: The pioneers cannot be condemned for taking the law into their own hands and defending themselves in the only way open to them, for the blacks own no law themselves but the law of might. The protection of outside districts by the Native Police, was the only course open, although the system cannot very well be defended any more than what was done under it can be.The white pioneers were harder on the blacks in the way of reprisals when they were forced to deal with them

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for spearing their men or their cattle and horses even than the Native Police. But how were property and the lives of stockmen, shepherds, and prospectors in the north to be protected unless by some summary system of retribution by Native Police or bands of pioneers?17 Such writers are aware of the country’s challenges, but have little time to appreciate its beauty. They follow the lead of the explorers, who were unaccompanied by white women, and the code of contemporary British men in rarely mentioning women or children or domestic arrangements. As aspiring members of the middle class – whether they were former officers like Gray or former bullockies like Palmer – and chronically short of labour, their attitudes to workers, seen for example in Gray’s comments on the 1891–94 shearers’ strikes, are a mixture of respect and condescension. By contrast, Charlie Bryde’s From Chart House to Bush Hut is a nar­ rative of working­class pioneering on a dairying selection near Malanda between 1912 and 1919. Written in a cheerful, punchy style, From Chart House to Bush Hut is a record of hardships on land and sea, memorable for neighbourly relationships formed during the drudgery of forest­clearing with axe and brush hook.The author is chronically broke and often close to starving. Number 12 of his tips for prospective selectors reads: ‘Keep your heart up and battle along. Don’t let set­backs break your spirit. The sticker gets there – like the postage stamp.’ Bryde committed himself to a settler’s life on ‘that glorious night . . . [when he decided] to say goodbye to the sea life’, but his book traces later journeys and jobs in New South Wales and Victoria.18 Other similarly peripatetic settler­authors were W. R. O. Hill and W. H. Corfield, whose volumes narrate travels in North Queensland during the forty years between first settlement and 1900. Hill served as a Native Police officer and police magistrate in many parts of Queensland, including Townsville and Mackay. Forty-five Years Experience in North Queensland (1907) is often resorted to as a source, but ‘every word’, according to Peter Bell, ‘must be regarded with suspicion by the historian’.19 Indeed, in writing himself into numerous murders, riots, lynchings, executions and racial confrontations, Hill depicts a North Queensland past packed with grotesque incidents and himself as a courageous officer, whose actions under fire triumph over a stammer

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and a modest stature, and who fulfils social ambitions in ‘labours of love as Churchwarden and Choirmaster’.20 Hill’s fractured self­presentation is a symptom of the stress that a heroic standard of masculine accomplish­ ment, initiated by explorers like Kennedy and perpetuated by pastoralists like Hann, imposed on the men who followed in their tracks. Corfield’s Reminiscences of Queensland consists of similarly engaging tales as the narrator roams through the region working stock, prospecting, bullock driving and water divining.21 His later respectability as a Queensland MLA explains the contrast between the primness of his style and his subject matter of pubs and mining camps. Travellers’ tales, 1863–1902 As well as promotional volumes, reports by over­burdened pastoralists and collections of fantastic anecdotes by local wanderers, the decades after set­ tlement saw the publication in London of picaresque travel narratives by visitors to North Queensland. Works such as C. H. Eden’s My Wife and I in Queensland (1872),22 A. W. Stirling’s The Never Never Land: A Ride in North Queensland (1884),23 T.Weitemeyer’s Missing Friends: Being the Adventures of a Danish Emigrant in Queensland (1892)24 and Arthur C. Bicknell’s Travel and Adventure in Northern Queensland (1895)25 catered to the British public’s fascination with exotic places in the years of Empire. Early chap­ ters in Karl Lumholtz’s Among Cannibals: An Account of Four Years’ Travels in Australia (1889) are similar, but the Norwegian author’s standing as an ethnologist distinguishes his narration, which devotes twenty chapters to an engaging but now disputed account of tribal life on the Herbert River west of Cardwell.26 Marion Ellis Rowan’s A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand (1898),27 a composite based on the writer’s three visits to North Queensland in 1887, 1891 and 1892,28 is a notable variation on the genre. It sets up the image of a resourceful lady traveller as an altern­ ative to brave explorers and dogged pioneers by recounting a series of death­defying adventures. Rowan was the daughter of a Victorian pastoral family, and her travels were smoothed by privilege, but her tales construct North Queensland as wild and crude and the climate as extreme. Her love of nature nevertheless softens this impression, with descriptions of the region’s rare and beautiful flowers, plants, trees, birds and animals, subjects that she displayed even more vividly in thousands of paintings.

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Edward B. Kennedy’s The Black Police of Queensland (1902), introduced by famous lines from Byron’s The Corsair,‘Far as the breeze can bear / The billows’ foam, survey our Empire’, imposes the frame of imperial adven­ ture narrative formulated in his boys’ novel Blacks and Bushrangers (1889) over his ‘colonial experience’ as a Native Police officer in the 1860s.29 He supports his claim to accuracy with photos of the force, thereby further destabilising a text that oscillates between facts and romance. Central to the adventure paradigm is the notion of the noble colonial official bestowing the gift of civilisation on native peoples. The wide dissemina­ tion of this military stereotype, epitomised in Jack McLaren’s collection of stories, Gentlemen of the Empire (1940), explains why a disproportion­ ate number of North Queensland officers published reminiscences of their time in the force.30 The heroic squatter is a second adventurous stereotype in The Black Police, and Kennedy devotes several chapters to an episode in which ‘Blake the Invincible’, ‘a great pioneer’, tracks down and ‘deal[s] with according to their deserts’ the ‘wild’ Aborigines who have ‘treacherously’ murdered station owners and overseers.31 Kennedy’s portraits elaborate the ideal of white masculinity that was a cornerstone of North Queensland’s literary life from the beginning. Two castaways Positioned early in the twentieth century on the fringes of European culture, Edmund James Banfield and Jack McLaren published popular narrative volumes that partially evaded the narrow social encoding that until then had characterised the region’s prose. Banfield and his wife, Bertha, retired to Dunk Island in 1897 after he had been driven nearly to breakdown by his labours as assistant editor of the Townsville Daily Bulletin. In retreat, he contributed a weekly series of ‘Rural Homilies’ to the Bulletin and the North Queensland Register, a selection of which were published to international acclaim in 1908 under the title The Confessions of a Beachcomber.32 There followed My Tropic Isle (1911), Tropic Days (1914), and Last Leaves from Dunk Island (1925), assembled by A. H. Chisholm from Banfield’s notes after his death on the island in 1923.33 H. P. Heseltine and Robert Zeller delineate the qualities that Ban­ field shares with nature writers like John Burroughs and W. H. Hudson,

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who, like him, traced a literary lineage to Gilbert White of Selborne and Henry Thoreau. Together with his fringe­dwelling life and sensi­ tive bookish character (detailed in Michael Noonan’s biography), these influences account for Banfield’s uniqueness in a North Queensland literary context.34 Like the pioneering literature discussed above, his books narrate the founding of a home, the development of the land and interactions with Aboriginal people. However, unlike the pioneers, who typically look back to a romantic past, Banfield is happy in the present as he contemplates the tranquil beauty of the island and the reef waters. In a further contrast with pioneer settlers’ frequent mental reduction of the landscape to a resistant if not antagonistic resource, he describes the reef and island flora and fauna, especially the birds and insects, in loving detail. His multitudinous allusions to the English classics are, as Heseltine suggests, ‘part of the very fabric of his imagined self ’,35 distinguishing him from most other North Queensland writers. Jack McLaren came to his place of exile, a coconut plantation on the west coast of Cape York where he lived from 1911 to 1919, after a decade of roving among South Pacific islands and countries, includ­ ing North Queensland. From Cape York he sent a stream of paragraphs to the Sydney Bulletin under the pseudonym of McNorth, while also writing Red Mountain (1919), the first of about twenty adventure novels that draw on his experience of tropical places.36 In Red Mountain, Alex Trotter, Alice Lendon and Vera, a Russian opera singer, are pursued by Aborigines when a cyclone in the Gulf wrecks their ship; after many dramatic escapades Alex and Alice marry, enriched by their discovery of a lode of copper. Red Mountain opens on Thursday Island, which also serves as a base in Sun Man (1928) and A Diver Went Down (1929), both of which contain authentic accounts of pearlers’ lives.37 The Savagery of Margaret Nestor (1921) and New Love for Old (1948) follow Red Mountain in intertwining passionate courtships with rivalry over Cape York lodes of tin and gold respectively. McLaren’s autobiographical books include My Odyssey (1923), also written at the plantation and narrating his wan­ derings, and My Crowded Solitude (1926), the story of his retreat.38 My Crowded Solitude, deservedly McLaren’s best­known book, resists categorisation even more stoutly than The Confessions of a Beachcomber. Although minute observations of bird, insect and reptile life are included,

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My Crowded Solitude only flirts with the nature­writing genre. Like Ban­ field, McLaren describes the building of his house and the beginning of cultivation at beautiful Utingu bay; and he briefly fancies himself in the role of pioneer: ‘it came to me that there was something romantic in being the first systematically to plant coconuts on so great a land and thereby to bring it into its own’. However, this is the starting point for a deconstruction of the pioneering ethos, including the notion of racial superiority that McLaren had picked up in his South Seas wanderings. Above all, My Crowded Solitude is distinguished from pioneering litera­ ture by the narrator’s openness to learning and doubting. In winning over local Aboriginal people with gifts and training them to work on his plantation, he at first believes that ‘it would be a fine thing indeed . . . if I succeeded in turning an entire people from wandering idleness to habits of industry’. But after the tribe has partly given up independent bush travel and hunting so as to stay close to plantation luxuries, he writes: All of which caused me to speculate whether, in being responsible for the implanting of those desires and needs, I was not guilty of a social wrong. There may have been something altruistic in raising a people a little from the depths of a great primitiveness. There was something definitely immoral in destroying their peace of mind.39 Banfield’s life on the reef opened him to a greater acceptance of Indig­ enous people than was usual in pioneer settlers, but he does not step down from the pedestal of racial superiority as often or as thoughtfully as McLaren. Twentieth-century pioneering tales The assumption that early settlers’ accomplishments were an appropriate foundation for a regional identity continued contemporaneously with Banfield and McLaren in works that commemorated selected profes­ sions. Examples are Bishop Gilbert White’s Thirty Years in Tropical Australia (1918), Reginald Spencer Browne’s A Journalist’s Memories (1927) and the missionary E. R. B. Gribble’s Forty Years with the Aborigines (1930).40 In addition, the younger generation published biographies to honour pioneering fathers, such as Mary Bennett’s well­written and humane

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Christison of Lammermoor (1927) and Michael Costello’s Life of John Costello (1930).41 The desire to look backwards with pride and regret was expressed most expansively, however, in writings by the Australian pub­ lishing phenomenon Ion Idriess. Born in 1889, Idriess grew up in northern New South Wales and Broken Hill and settled in Sydney from 1930. His fifty­six books, rang­ ing through or mixing the genres of fiction, reminiscence, biography and popular history, and first published between 1927 and 1968, are set in many rural parts of the continent. However, the years that he spent before the First World War prospecting in the hinterland between Cook­ town and Cairns, while contributing paragraphs to the Sydney Bulletin, were formative for his writing and the beginning of a ‘life­long romance with the Cape York Peninsula and points north’.42 His first book, Madman’s Island (1927), was based on a diary kept while he was marooned on Howick Island with a prospecting mate unbalanced from war wounds.43 He gathered material for Headhunters of the Coral Sea (1930) and Drums of Mer (1933) while working as a deckhand and on the Thursday Island docks.44 Like most of his publications, these were commercial successes but hardly useful as anthropology or history. In 1947 Isles of Despair told the tale of Barbara Thompson, a Scottish girl held captive for five years in the 1840s by Prince of Wales Islanders.45 Her story converged with that of escaped convict Billy Winn in The Wild White Man of Badu, pub­ lished in 1950.46 Idriess’s memories of the region were also the force behind Coral Sea Calling (1957), a selective history of nineteenth­century sailors, pearlers and trepang fishers, warmly and informally narrated.47 He recalled his prospecting years on the Peninsula in Men of the Jungle (1932),48 and in his sixties and seventies revisited these memories in a series of books that also included tales of exploration and settlement: Back o’ Cairns (1958), The Tin Scratchers (1959), The Wild North (1960) and My Mate Dick (1962).49 Their vivid representations of ordinary men’s aspirations and anxie­ ties explain the popularity of Idriess’s books. The first­person narrator of his North Queensland writings is a digger in pursuit of ‘the golden rain­ bow’,50 an embodiment of the drive for wealth that propelled many young men into the region. Still a digger in a different context, Idriess speaks for the everyday soldier in his distinguished volume of war memories, The

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Desert Column (1932).51 His lively accounts of North Queensland history, celebrating the construction of roads, railways, towns and mines, are a reassuring endorsement of men’s traditional accomplishments in a colo­ nial culture. His books also assume the white supremacist values typical of the Bulletin school of writers and generally of Australian culture in the period. Such features were especially appealing during the Depression, which roused much male self­doubt, and during the Second World War, which saw the temporary triumph of Japan, a non­white nation. Finally, in choosing outsiders – fossickers, fishermen, sailors, divers, sandalwood­ getters and lonely planters and traders – as protagonists for his Cape York and island stories, Idriess offered men an escape from domestic responsibilities into a life of adventure and mateship, packed with exotic characters and set in a romantic past. Hector Holthouse, who worked as a sugar chemist in North Queens­ land before the Second World War, succeeded Idriess but was a more scrupulous historian and a better stylist. First published between 1967 and 1991, his eighteen books promote tourism or are popular histories of Queensland regions, north Australian seas and Pacific islands. While he does not write first­person reminiscences, in River of Gold: The Wild Days of the Palmer River Goldrush (1967) he mimics Idriess by adopting the narrative perspective of diggers in the third person, thereby silently endorsing North Queensland racial views of the 1870s.52 Holthouse’s accounts of dangerous trails and raw mining townships offer readers an escape to a masculine paradise of adventure, where they can know the thrill of finding gold and the delights of drinking, brawling and gaming, free from refinement or restraint. River of Gold further conforms with the tradition of exploration and pioneering narratives by dressing first one and then another character in the mantle of hero, and in paying much attention to Aboriginal attacks on settlers but little to ‘dispersals’. Holthouse sensationalises Aboriginal resistance beyond pioneering con­ ventions in descriptions of maiming, rape, kidnapping and cannibalism. He followed River of Gold with six commercially­driven representa­ tions of North Queensland: Cannibal Cargoes (1969), on the recruiting of Pacific Islanders as cane labourers, North Queensland in Colour (1970), a tourist booklet, Up Rode the Squatter (1970), a collection of outback Queensland pioneering tales, Cyclone (1971), a history of havoc caused

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to pearling fleets and townships, Ships in the Coral (1976), descriptively subtitled Explorers, Wrecks and Traders of the Northern Australian Coast, and (more respectable) The Australian Geographic Book of Cape York (1991). In 1977 Faith Bandler’s Wacvie,53 a biography of her father, who was brought from the New Hebrides in the 1890s to work on a sugar farm near Mackay, provided a corrective to Cannibal Cargoes, and embodied the era’s emerging sensitivity on racial issues. Pioneering tales: the female tradition Founded as they were on exploration narratives, North Queensland pio­ neering volumes were male­oriented throughout the nineteenth century, a position later consolidated by Idriess’s and Holthouse’s domination of the market. However, from the mid­century an alternative tradition began to emerge, based on recovered writings by women pioneers and on the memories of women more recently settled in remote districts. When Australische Briefe by the naturalist Amalie Dietrich, who travelled the region between 1863 and 1872, finally achieved publication with an English introduction in 1943, the ideological impact of the tradition was slight.54 However, Rachel Henning’s letters, first printed in the Bulletin between 1951 and 1952, initiated a gradual widening of the northern pioneering literary tradition beyond its patriarchal parameters.55 Henning recounts her life in England before her migration to Aus­ tralia, and her later farm life as a married woman in the Illawarra district. Her central, most vivid group of letters, however, written between 1862 and 1866, narrates her journey with her sister Annie to their brother Biddulph’s station 160 kilometres west of Port Denison (Bowen). The letters from ‘Exmoor’ substitute a feeling of light­hearted liberation for the struggle endemic in narratives by Hann, Palmer and Gray. In England Henning had lived as a maiden aunt, caught up in visiting rituals and a little genteel charity work. Following this affectionate but regimented existence, her response to North Queensland reads like the emotional equivalent of taking off a tight corset. She responded with equal enthu­ siasm to the challenges of establishing a garden, planning and overseeing a new dwelling and bottle­feeding lambs orphaned by drought. Far from feeling isolated, she revelled in the limited society of ‘Exmoor’, where she entertained only a few under­managers and occasional travellers.

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Henning’s letters were the first to fill out the picture of early North Queensland station life with domestic details. The diaries and journals of Robert Gray’s sisters­in­law, Lucy and Eva Gray, first edited by Anne Allingham in 1987, are in many respects comparable.56 They enrich Robert’s constricted references to his female relations. Dated from September 1868 to March 1871, Lucy’s journal, which was intended for publication, covers her voyage from Sydney, her arrival at ‘Hughenden’ and her subsequent life at ‘Glendower’ sta­ tion. Written spontaneously and with ‘real literary skill’,57 it incorporates many vivid stories, as well as pen­and­ink sketches, of people and places encountered. In 1958, when Idriess’s sales were beginning to slacken, Angus & Robertson based another successful campaign on narratives of the north when they published Elizabeth O’Conner’s (Barbara McNamara’s) remi­ niscences of postwar station life in the Gulf Country, Steak for Breakfast.58 Together with its sequel, A Second Helping (1969), this book remained continuously in print into the 1980s.59 O’Conner’s depiction of a cheer­ ful family life sustained among outback hardships appealed to readers as escapist reinforcement of traditional pioneering and marital values, which were being questioned as the century advanced. Although profoundly conservative on racial, class and gender issues,60 O’Conner’s recollections departed from the masculine pioneering tradition in their pervasive ver­ bal humour and physical comedy. Like Henning’s Letters, they focused on the homestead as a feminised space, while their positioning of the first­ person narrator as a white wife and mother within the isolated North reversed the typical positioning of Idriess’s narrator as an outsider. Following the success of Idriess’s and O’Conner’s autobiographical works, in 1973 Angus & Robertson published Evelyn Maunsell’s S’pose I Die.61 Ghost­written by Hector Holthouse, this well­crafted book com­ memorates the settlers of the upper Mitchell River and Malanda districts where Maunsell lived between 1912 and 1945. She grounds her narrative in the physical realities of hot toilsome days as a station­manager’s wife. The ordinary hierarchy of regional pioneering writing prevails, in that everyone, including Evelyn, refers to her husband Charlie as ‘the Boss’, and feelings of discomfort with husbandly rule are quickly suppressed. Caught up in the flow of comic or tragic events, the reader identifies

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with Evelyn in her trials and triumphs, until the longed­for birth of her son provides an emotional end­point. Dealing like O’Conner with remote North Queensland life after the Second World War, but not published until 1990, A Christmas Card in April: Station Life on the Palmer River in the 1940s and 1950s is a series of tape­recorded recollections by the owners of ‘Strathleven’, Thelma and Eric Martel, and their daughter Lynette Illingsworth.62 It also contains two briefer sections by Jessie, a semi­tribal Aboriginal woman, whose labour and that of her people sustained the station. The speakers reveal a past of unrelenting physical labour, but Eric is like Charlie Bryde in upholding the power of mental resilience. In contrast with Steak for Breakfast and S’pose I Die, A Christmas Card in April reflects later sensitivi­ ties by allowing women’s and Aboriginal voices to be heard, with the result that Eric is humanised as a fellow doer and sufferer and becomes a more likeable patriarchal pioneer than most. Among later compara­ ble narratives are Marion Houldsworth’s The Morning Side of the Hill: A Townsville Childhood 1939–45 (1995), and the same author’s collection of recorded stories by residents: Barefoot through the Bindies: Growing Up in North Queensland in the Early 1900s (2002).63 Autobiographies and family histories from 1980 By recreating their authors’ early years in North Queensland from the perspective of later experience elsewhere, recent sophisticated autobiog­ raphies have introduced readers to aspects of regional life not canvassed previously. Their ambivalence is encapsulated in a comment in The Beckoning Horizon (1983) by the distinguished journalist Colin Bing­ ham (1898–1986) on growing up in Maxwelton and Townsville: ‘that youthful time was the good time – I was so unhappy!’64 Included in this group are: The Boy Adeodatus (1984), by the art critic and cultural histo­ rian Bernard Smith;65 Joan Colebrook’s autobiography A House of Trees (1987), a continuation of the rebellion fictionalised forty years earlier in The Northerner;66 Alan Frost’s East Coast Country (1996), a northwards pilgrimage along the coast to the Daintree, enriched with stories and poems;67 Roberta Sykes’s Snake Cradle, which disseminated awareness of the oppression of Townsville racial groups when it won the 1997 Age Book of the Year prize;68 My Dark Brother (2000), Elena Govor’s

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sprawling narrative of the Illins, a Tableland family of combined Rus­ sian and Aboriginal heritage; and Shirley Walker’s Roundabout at Bangalow (2001), recalling the author’s life in the 1950s as the wife of a soldier­ settler on Rita Island in the Burdekin delta.69 Finally, cultural changes wrought in the region following the founding of James Cook University are traced in Why Weren’t We Told? (1999), by history professor Henry Reynolds.70 This partial autobiography relates how the author’s observa­ tion of race relations in Townsville from the late 1960s alerted him to ‘the great Australian silence’ about frontier conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people, a silence in which many of the pioneering texts dis­ cussed above were complicit.

North Queensland fiction Fiction set in North Queensland fills a spectrum ranging from hack­ neyed replications of romantic conventions to some of the most original and deeply felt Australian writing. While some writers exploited the region merely as an exotic location, others carefully charted its differen­ tiating features. Like the pioneering narratives and like the thousands of regional short stories, anecdotes and articles published in newspapers,71 some fictional works tacitly endorsed the white male entrepreneurial hegemony. Others, however, contested regional power structures, thus upholding fiction’s status as the subversive genre. Chief among such mav­ erick texts are Xavier Herbert’s and Thea Astley’s novels. Furthermore, from the beginning of the twentieth century, women novelists extended Rachel Henning’s response to the region by adopting a sense of freedom in nature as a basis for self­assertion. A group of women romance writ­ ers led by Rosa Praed viewed the North’s luxuriant open spaces as a site of female liberation from restrictions in the South. During the Second World War the passionate works of Jean Devanny and Sarah Campion added a momentum to this revolt that was maintained into the twenty­ first century by Devanny’s literary ‘daughters’. Stories by novelist Janette Turner Hospital contributed yet another, dystopic, dimension to the region’s representations. The open northern landscapes similarly inspired canonical Austral­ ian writers to produce novels of inner exploration and spiritual growth, thereby transforming the exploration narratives into metaphor.The most

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obvious example is Patrick White’s Voss (1957), a mystical recreation of Leichhardt’s epic journeys and disappearance.72 White’s A Fringe of Leaves (1976) similarly set the agenda for novels that have based profound explorations of the European self and the mixed culture of modern Aus­ tralia on narratives of historical or personal encounters with the region’s Indigenous people.73 Among such works are David Malouf ’s Remembering Babylon (1993)74 and Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002).75 Set just before the First World War, Thomas Shapcott’s Theatre of Darkness (1998) presents Thursday Island as a site where old certainties give way to modern insecurities, and where the West’s sophisticated culture, represented by the dying American soprano Lillian Nordica, encounters the humid heat and curious local histories of the tropics.76 This section, however, focuses on works that have been less frequently interpreted and critiqued. Early pioneering novels The earliest published book­length fiction set in the region was Ernest Favenc’s ‘Jack Essingham; or the Graves of a Household (A Tale of Northern Queensland)’, printed in the Queenslander between August and December 1875.77 The hero protects his family in England by chiv­ alrously taking the blame for a fault committed by his cousin. Favenc draws on his experience of outback townships in portraying the nar­ row, gossipy existence of Yarravilla, but his presentation of the dignified lifestyle of established station­owners and their relations heightens class­ based assumptions into romance.When the narrative moves to the newly stocked North Queensland station of ‘Hillingford’, it recalls the real­ life trials of the Hanns and Robert Gray. Exciting or comic episodes abound, and embedded plots resemble the stories that Favenc was soon to contribute to the Sydney Bulletin. The writing is nevertheless distin­ guished from other bush romances by the narrator’s ironic distancing from his material and by his recognition that virtue and self­sacrifice are not always rewarded. Louis Becke’s novel Tom Gerrard and his novella Chinkie’s Flat, both published in 1904, deal uncritically with the lust for gold that drives so many true and fictional North Queensland narratives. Each places stock characters and never­a­dull­moment plots in the romantic settings of

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Somerset, Cooktown and the Palmer. However, the writing does not comply with all of the region’s social givens. Like his successors Idriess and Holthouse, Becke identifies as narrator with Anglo­Australian dig­ gers, but he uses irony in Chinkie’s Flat to protest against attacks on the Chinese. He also reveals an ethical resistance to the Native Police. In Tom Gerrard, the villain, Randolph Aulain, is a former inspector,78 while Chinkie’s Flat refers to the Native Police as ‘black, legalised murderers’, a phrase that intermeshes liberal and racist attitudes. Chinkie’s Flat further evokes the horror of ‘dispersals’ with an honesty rare in early regional prose: She could not help a slight shudder as she heard the soft­voiced debonnair Lamington speak of his ‘work.’ She knew what it meant – a score or two of stilled, bullet­riddled figures of men, women and children lying about in the hot desert sand, or in the dark shades of some mountain scrub.79 Randolph Bedford’s only North Queensland novel, Aladdin and the Boss Cockie (1920), extended Becke’s endorsement of wealth­making through mining as a motive for adventure.80 Three years later, Nancy Francis’s serial in the Northern Herald, ‘Queensland Luck’, set the recurrent quest­ for­mineral­wealth plot in a romantic family drama.81 Flight to freedom: female tropical romance Rosa Praed’s Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1902) and The Lost Earl of Ellan: A Story of Australian Life (1906) are the only two novels by that prolific writer set in North Queensland. In both novels the heroine flees from the sea to find a higher form of love on Cape York. In The Lost Earl of Ellan Oora Galbraith saves herself and a male companion from the Quetta, sunk off the tip of the Cape in 1890,82 while Fugitive Anne tells how the twenty­year­old Anne (Marley) Bedo escapes from an abusive drunken husband by swimming ashore from a steamer between Cooktown and Thursday Island. Anne’s notebook on landing gives pas­ sionate form to Rachel Henning’s feeling for the northern bush as a site of women’s freedom:

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‘Better death in the wild woods than life in chains.’ ‘Anne Marley hails Nature, the emancipator.’ ‘How sweet the taste of freedom! How intoxicating the joy of deliverance!’83 Anne finally finds love with Eric Hansen, a Danish naturalist resembling Leichhardt, while they are living among a lost Atlantan race, the Red Men of Acan. Three examples of later so­called women’s fiction, The Lute Girl of Rainyvale (1925) by Zora Cross, The Singing Gold by Dorothy Cottrell (1927) and Jungle Night by Marie Bjelke­Petersen (1937), follow Fugitive Anne in presenting North Queensland as a place where female characters find freedom and ideal love. Cross, who wrote for the Worker and the Bulletin and courageously explored her emotional and sexual experi­ ences in three volumes of poetry, initially follows romantic convention in The Lute Girl by creating an eighteen­year­old naive heroine who lives in Brisbane. However, a sequence of momentous events, accelerating on the steamer conveying her to Townsville, enlightens Melise about life and love: Here in the North, with the day a yellow panther thirsting in the heat, and the night a naked savage, lawless as love, incomparably chaste as Nature, splendid as passion and desire, even the most disciplined woman may turn in a moment back to the golden days of simple for­ est beginnings.84 For Dorothy Cottrell, confined to a wheelchair by polio, North Queens­ land was literally a place of adult emancipation, when, having secretly married the bookkeeper at her uncle’s property in south­west Queens­ land, she went with him to Dunk Island in 1923. The Singing Gold includes refreshingly humorous episodes based on the young couple’s island honey­ moon.85 By contrast, Ross Smith rightly describes Bjelke­Petersen’s Jungle Night (1937), set in the Cairns hinterland, as ‘not only sentimental but sensationally melodramatic’.86 The plot consists of overcoming obsta­ cles in the path of love between the fabulously wealthy timber magnate Tony Valmont, whose home is a dazzling white Tableland mansion, and

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Robin Lockhart, who has roamed the rainforest dressed as a boy since childhood. Descriptions of the ‘jungle’s’ alternately sinister and alluring beauty abound, and in the tradition of Shakespearean romance it is a site for both a sexual and a spiritual quest. Like Henning and Cottrell, and like Praed’s and Cross’s heroines, Robin enjoys freedom in the wild nature of the North, but when, in a reversal of Melise’s northward pro­ gression, she finally flees to Brisbane where Valmont proposes, she dresses like a girl and tries to behave as expected. Bjelke­Petersen – the aunt of Queensland’s future premier – exploits Lakes Barrine and Eacham, the Herberton crater, and the deep pool at the foot of the Barron Falls, where the villain, Brood, is finally taken by a crocodile, for their exotic appeal to readers in America and England. The turning point: Jean Devanny and Sarah Campion From the beginning, narratives by women, both fictional and non­fictional, diverged from the pioneering orthodoxies of North Queensland. How­ ever, in the volatile Depression years and during the Second World War, when the masculine populist stance fostered by Idriess was a force for countering social instability, women’s fiction came to confront directly the region’s entrenched values. By serendipity, the 1930s saw the arrival of Jean Devanny and Sarah Campion, whose novels were influenced by the left­wing political ideas then transforming Australian fiction with writ­ ing in a social realist mode.87 In North Queensland this ‘new literature’, with its canvassing of revolutionary change, was to have an especially powerful effect, as Devanny’s and Campion’s contrasting works offered radically new understandings of the region. Like the real and fictional women discussed above, Devanny relished North Queensland as a release from restrictions in the civilised South. She first visited Cairns and the Tableland in 1934 during a lecture tour for the Communist Party undertaken as an escape from platform ora­ tory in Sydney. Retreating northwards again after the death of her son, she supported the cane workers of Mourilyan, Tully and Innisfail in their strike over Weil’s disease. Her novel Sugar Heaven (1936), which interweaves a fictional story with a detailed report of the strike, was a breakthrough in the literature of North Queensland, where it sold well.88 Rather than implicitly endorsing the exploitative urges that had

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opened up the North, Devanny vividly recreates the real conditions of labourers in a major industry. Sugar Heaven is naively propagandist in its representation of the strike leaders, the strikers, the bosses and the scabs, but perceptive in exposing the AWU’s collusion with the government. It challenges the racism then prevalent in Labor circles by insisting on the equality of foreign­born cutters and by exposing colonial attacks on Aborigines. Furthermore, it displaces romance from an hierarchical bush society onto a utopian communism, and transforms the reticence of female romance into a generous and frank eroticism, linked with a celebration of the fecundity of the sugar country. In tracing the politi­ cal and sexual education of the sisters­in­law Dulcie and Eileen Lee, Devanny extends earlier women writers’ view of the region as a place of expanding knowledge, but maintains communist prescriptions concern­ ing wives’ roles in the workers’ struggle. Following an intense speaking campaign in the North against Fascist Spain, Devanny returned to Sydney where she completed a second cane­ fields novel, Paradise Flow (1938), set on a Johnstone River plantation.89 The characters represent social forces in contention for the body and mind of Laurel, wife of the owner, Big Bill Macquarie, who is subjected to a critique unprecedented in the region’s writing about men of his class. His manager, the huge Yugoslav and communist Muranivich, falls in love with Laurel, and instructs her in politics, economics and sex. Devan­ ny’s ideals of free love and of acting in accord with feeling – ‘flow’ – here challenge both standard and communist puritanical assumptions. Following the outbreak of war in September 1939, Devanny was caught up in Sydney in an intense campaign in defence of the Stalinist peace policy. Exhausted and ill, she retreated northwards in May 1940, the month when the Communist Party of Australia was formally out­ lawed. She records her coastal journey with Rose Keith under police surveillance in By Tropic Sea and Jungle (1944), a vivid celebration of the region’s unspoiled landscapes and working­class people. During this trip Devanny commenced her third North Queensland novel.90 Set in Cairns (Pearltown) in 1938–39, Roll Back the Night (1945) embodies both the confusion of Communist Party politics in the early war years and Devanny’s inner struggle between political idealism and her passion for writing.91

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Carole Ferrier’s biography of Devanny uncovers the events against which these books were written.92 As chairperson of the local CPA unit at Emuford, a remote Tableland tin­mining settlement, Devanny fearlessly investigated charges of drunkenness and sexual misconduct. It appears that she was raped by men of the unit, acting from mateship solidarity and an imperative to ‘keep women in their place’. Devanny’s experience resonates with the adoption of diggers as authorial personas by Becke, Bedford, Idriess and Holthouse and with the unequal social status of North Queensland men and women. It further demonstrates how male­ centred frontier codes inevitably conflicted with women writers’ quest for peace and knowledge in the free northern environment. From October 1941 Devanny oscillated between the fringes of Com­ munist Party and literary life in Sydney and employment in Cairns by her friend Dr Hugo Flecker, president of the Naturalists’ Club. Mean­ while she collected material for Travels in North Queensland (1951) and conducted interviews published in 1945 as Bird of Paradise, a book about ordinary Australians’ contributions to the war effort.93 In that same year she began writing Cindie (1949), planned as the first in a canefields trilogy and considered her most accomplished novel.94 Set on ‘Folkhaven’ between 1896 and 1905, Cindie completes a tra­ jectory in Devanny’s published North Queensland fiction in that its commitment to women’s freedom and fulfilment is largely unencum­ bered by party politics. The heroine, Cindie, is initially maid to the owner’s wife, and she rises through creative planning, physical labour and care of Islander and Aboriginal workers to become de facto plantation manager. She harvests contentment and fulfilment from the splendour of the tropical landscape. Aged thirty, she loses her virginity to the owner’s eighteen­year­old son, finally marrying him in a wedding that defies convention. From October 1945 until her death in 1962 Devanny lived mostly in North Queensland. She drafted three further novels and rewrote her autobiography, Point of Departure, edited by Ferrier in 1986.95 Between 1936 and 1949 Sugar Heaven, Paradise Flow, Roll Back the Night and Cindie, together with Devanny’s travel writing and interviews, had offered a revolutionary reconstruction of race, gender and class relationships in North Queensland.

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Sarah Campion (who was born Mary Rose Coulton) arrived as the cook at a station on the Atherton Tableland early in 1939. This was the end­point of a parabola of flight from an autocratic academic father in Cambridgeshire that had already taken her to Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Germany. A few months later the outbreak of war obliged Campion to return to her elderly parents, but she took with her inspiration for the long novels of the Burdekin trilogy: Mo Burdekin (1941), Bonanza (1942) and The Pommy Cow (1944).96 To turn from Jean Devanny to Sarah Campion is to move from an aspiring, experimental, romantic writer to an author whose parameters were more fixed, who was brilliantly intellectual as well as vigorously creative, and who applied a hard intelligence to the many forms that the romantic impulse takes in her books. Like Cindie, the Burdekin trilogy is set in the seminal Federation period. Robust and energetic, the novels recreate a pivotal decade in North Queensland history in vivid, sprawl­ ing, fast­paced narratives that offer deeply satiric insights. The celebrated Prologue to Mo Burdekin describes the awesome advent of the Wet and the dam­burst that destroys the protagonist’s family but leaves him as a baby floating in his wooden cradle on ‘the broad tossing breast of the Burdekin’.97 The presentation of nature as a potent maternal force, unpredictably destructive and nurturing, is central to the trilogy’s representation of North Queensland. By contrast, the efforts of fossickers to reshape the landscape, the masculine civilising forces with which writ­ ers from Dalrymple to Idriess so readily identified, often appear as puny and inconsequential: mine workings, tools and equipment are typically left behind to moulder for ever in the encroaching bush. Mo Burdekin himself, after a brief life obsessed with mining, is finally suffocated by the rising mud of another Wet as he sleeps beneath a bullock dray. As the character whose picaresque adventures hold the trilogy together, Mo allows the pervasive digger icon to be examined from a range of outside perspectives, including those of his philosophical foster­father, Reuben, his boyhood friend, Lucy, and his beloved wife, Kate. Like Devanny’s novels, therefore, the Burdekin trilogy challenges the entrepreneurial frontier values widely endorsed in the region’s literature. Whereas Devanny arrived at a final affirmation of female competency only in Cindie, the Prologue to Mo Burdekin incorporates Campion’s

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pre­existing appreciation of women as practical workers and uphold­ ers of humane values against socially privileged male obsessions. In the Prologue the little girl Janey leads her tiny brothers and sisters away from the floods while her drunken Irish father continues to fossick for gold, reluctantly turning at the last moment, in a grotesque episode, to bury his wife’s flyblown body. Mo likewise grows up to follow his obsession at the expense of those who love him, leading Kate to analyse the pas­ sion that has ruled his life: ‘It was not gold grubbing for the sake of cash which so obsessed him, but a deeper and far more dangerous urge which ousted even a wife from his thoughts.’98 The Burdekin trilogy concludes bleakly that the inclusive female consciousness will remain indefinitely submerged beneath the privileged masculine passions, with repeated tragic consequences. The bitter feminism of the Prologue is reiterated in satiric marriages later in the trilogy, and also in Campion’s critique of war as a profoundly irrational masculine enterprise. In contrast with Devanny’s continuing faith in women’s quest for fulfilment and the proletariat’s struggle for justice, Campion’s fiction impresses by the long list of targets demolished. She nevertheless persists in celebrating the newness of Australia, especially the grandeur of the North Queensland bush, and in affirming women’s inner strength as a refuge from a hostile social environment. Her main gift to her readers, however, is a disillusioned clarity of vision. Postwar fiction Like Devanny and Campion, Joan Colebrook challenged the region’s pioneering ethos and explored the repercussions of widely accepted sexual conventions. The Northerner (1950) traces three generations of the Cromwell family based at ‘Kula’, an Atherton Tableland dairy farm, from the building of the Cairns–Kuranda railway in 1886–87 to the death of the farm’s founder, Richard Cromwell, just before the Second World War. An heroic figure of grandiose vision, by no means unsympathetic, Cromwell seeks always to acquire more land, gambling on his physical strength and his ability to work long hours. However, ‘Kula’ becomes steadily more indebted and is sold off paddock by paddock to Henry Johnstone, a miserly neighbour and former employee. Richard’s standing

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in the community is undermined as his health fails. His wife, Elizabeth, initially the perfect, strong maternal helpmeet – ‘he was her husband and something like a god to her’99 – surrenders her pieces of capital to support his schemes, but, when she refuses to sign over her last small insurance policy, in a twisted reassertion of masculinity he beats her with a riding crop. Elizabeth seamlessly continues with the marriage and service to her family, having renounced anything she might have wanted to do for her­ self. The implied judgment on this relationship contrasts with Maunsell’s more compliant female perspective on Tableland pioneering. Colebrook also uncovers the reality of male vulnerability concealed beneath the triumphalism of colonial conquest since Leichhardt. Through Richard’s and Elizabeth’s daughters, Eleanor and Poppy, The Northerner goes on to explore female sexuality as a socially disruptive, liberating force. By contrast, Elizabeth O’Conner’s novels were popular works that reformulated the region’s pioneering values for the postwar generation of readers. The Irishman (1960) is a well­written and moving, profoundly conservative book. Set in ‘any of the old gold­mining towns of North Queensland’ between 1922 and 1929, when trucks and cars were gradu­ ally replacing horses and bullocks, it looks back nostalgically to the mining era.100 Paddy Doolan, the main bearer of the book’s frontier mythology, is a teamster, heroic, and gentle with his horses, but flawed in that he is a drunk and a wife­beater. Most attention is paid to Paddy’s relation­ ships with his sons. When he deserts the family after beating his elder son, the focus shifts to an anguished quest for his father by the younger son, Michael. After a long­deferred joyful meeting, Paddy is killed while timber­getting on the Tableland, but by then Michael has grown up to take his place as frontiersman and horse­lover. The remoteness of the Gulf accounts for the comic idiosyncrasies of characters forced to adapt to harsh conditions in O’Conner’s Find a Woman.101 The plot traces the year­long marriage of a middle­aged station owner of Norwegian descent, Waldo Peterson, and a flighty eighteen­ year­old Irish gypsy, Ruby Maloney. Waldo and his elder brother, Sigurd, rule at ‘Camp Hill’ by moral right of their responsible attitude to babies and animals, but their hegemony is primarily underpinned by their ownership of land, stock and homestead. The narrative opens with the brothers admitting that they would like to arrange for someone to inherit

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their property and ends when a son is born to each of them, guarantee­ ing paternal descent. The Chinee Bird (1966), written for older children, draws like O’Conner’s autobiographical writing on her zest for outback north­ ern living. The setting is ‘Didgeree’, a cattle station on ‘the Basalt’, high country west of the Atherton Tableland.102 As a microcosm of North Queensland society, ‘Didgeree’ is ruled benevolently by the ‘Boss’ Mr Baxter and Mrs Baxter, parents of ten­year­old Emma, whose best friend is the Aboriginal girl Sal. The plot is partly about integrating Sal and her older brother Benny into subordinate roles in white society. After Benny accidentally breaks a dollar bird’s leg with his slingshot, the bird’s care becomes a narrative focus, until, in a moving sequence, it finally takes off in acrobatic flight, heading, Sal thinks, for its home in China. Thus the novel transposes the impulse for freedom into poetry. The benevo­ lent despotism of station life is maintained in O’Conner’s romance The Wind of Fate (written as Anne Willard, 1977), when emotionally dam­ aged characters from a research team find refuge at the Gulf homestead of ‘Gareth’.103 As escapist fantasy, The Wind of Fate virtually elides Abor­ iginality, an impulse already apparent in O’Conner’s earlier domestic romances. Elizabeth O’Conner’s last novel, Spirit Man (1980), adheres to the pioneering genre in looking backwards with reverence, in this case to the 1930s. ‘Didgella’ on ‘the Basalt’ is a ‘sanctuary . . . offering comfort and security’104 to the Missus and her children when Aboriginal intruders, the brothers Jacko and Tommy Cobbett, invade an outbuilding during a night storm. Jacko believes that eating the kidney fat of a strong man will cure his sick brother, and they choose as their victim Big Charlie Didgella, the Boss’s Aboriginal assistant, who soon dies of his wounds. In tracing their tragic fate with compassion, Spirit Man individualises Jacko and Tommy but enacts a parable of racial disempowerment by stereo­ typing features of Indigenous culture. Sugar country novels published in the 1960s by John Naish extend the masculinist orientation of O’Conner’s fiction. Naish was born in Glamorganshire in 1923, and after a five­year period in the Brigade of Guards immigrated to Australia, where he worked in the 1950s as a cane­ cutter and itinerant labourer. Set in ‘the world above Townsville – the Far

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North’, the episodic plot of The Cruel Field (1962) spans the 1952 har­ vesting season and portrays people and customs of the coastal sugar belt in the social­realist mode established by Devanny. The travail of cane­ cutting, the breakdowns and the deaths inflicted on an earlier generation by Weil’s disease are authentically portrayed: ‘Cain killed Abel and Cane killed Jack Kelly.’105 The novel’s working­class orientation is abetted by a romanticising of the cane­cutters, announced in the novel’s dedication as ‘the Gentlemen of the Flashing Blade’. Women allure the workers, but are found to be foolish, heartless or mercenary, and the mood at the close of the season is bleak. Naish went on to explore the problem of unmerited suffering in a second canefields novel, That Men Should Fear (1963).106 Brown Sugar (1974) by the literary activist, poet and prolific novelist Nancy Cato is a popular exposé of the late­nineteenth­century trade in Pacific Islanders. It sensationalises Islanders’ retaliations and includes a cannibalism story worthy of Idriess or Holthouse. The family saga is set mostly in the Maryborough region, and a young wife brought by her husband to a Mackay plantation is driven out by isolation, a cyclone and her feeling of imprisonment: ‘It was all right in the raised house, it was only at ground­level she felt shut in, overwhelmed, like a beetle lost in an enormous lawn.’107 Well­plotted and researched and highly read­ able, Brown Sugar lacks the detailed authenticity of Devanny’s and Naish’s sugar country novels. Jean Devanny’s ‘daughters’: later North Queensland fiction Active support or passive acceptance of patriarchal, racial and class dis­ tinctions in North Queensland narratives, reinforced by the region’s remoteness and prolonged status as a frontier, were disrupted in the mid­ twentieth century by women’s fiction, chiefly the novels of Devanny, Campion and Colebrook. Later women travel writers and novelists continued this subversive trend into the twenty­first century. Among Devanny’s successors were the travel writers Neilma Sidney, whose Journey to Mourilyan: A Coastal Pilgrimage (1986) is written with curiosity and enthusiasm but without Devanny’s sense of adventure, and Rosaleen Love, whose Reefscape (2000) refers back to Devanny’s experiments with diving.108 Mount Isa novels in the Devanny tradition are Betty Collins’s

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The Copper Crucible (1966) and Kay Brown’s Knock Ten (1976).109 These present miners and mining from a family perspective, and therefore trace their literary lineage back to Campion. For many years an activist in the Communist Party of Australia, Collins wrote The Copper Crucible in support of the workers’ struggle, in this case the 1964–65 miners’ strike. She traces the background to the strike from the late 1950s, through fictional and thinly disguised real characters.110 Centring on the newlyweds Julie and Nick Spiros, The Copper Crucible captures with passionate realism the hot, dusty, constricted lives of the mining families, including gender restrictions imposed on wives, the dangerous, sweaty jobs of the men and the tense but often rewarding interactions between Anglo­Celtic and migrant miners. Kay Brown began a friendship with Devanny in Sydney in 1930 and continued it in correspondence after the war when Devanny was living in Cairns and Brown in Mt Isa.111 Brown’s novel Knock Ten is loosely based on the author’s childhood in a north­western siding town. It is narrated by Lee Cleary, the only girl in an Irish Catholic family of four sons, and is a novel of working­class community life, rich with story­telling and unusual characters. Suspense and surprise maintain the reader’s interest as the plot follows family members and friends through the Depression and the Second World War. In contrast with Devanny and Collins, Brown assumes faith, hope and love as weapons against misfortune, poverty and violence, while also acknowledging human limitations and the power of circumstance. Carole Ferrier’s edition of letters between women writers, As Good as a Yarn with You, reveals that Devanny communicated regularly with female literary friends. Gina Mercer’s Parachute Silk (2001), which cen­ tres on female friendship expressed in letters, revitalises this tradition in fiction. Mercer’s recreation of tropical academic life in letters from Finn to Molly includes analogies like the following: ‘All those smooth urbane cosmopolitan types are seething beneath the facade, hidden griefs writhing lively as a mango full of fruit­fly maggots.’112 The focus in Parachute Silk on ties among women, including lesbian love, as alternatives to family relationships, introduced a radical new element into North Queensland narratives.

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Kay Donovan’s mellow book Bush Oranges (2001) remakes, and might be said to redeem, a century of North Queensland history from 1903, when cyclone Leonta struck Townsville, through brief interwoven first­ person reflections by women of the Minton family.113 The chief narrator is Kate, now revisiting Townsville from her home in Sydney, and finding, like Devanny, relief from commitments in the South. Kate’s reflections begin with memories of her grandmother Annie, whose parents emigrated from Ireland.With her sister Maggie, Annie witnessed the destructiveness of Leonta from their house on Castle Hill. The stories of her daughters, Iris, Nell (Kate’s mother), Maudie and Phyllis, who were young women in the war years, and that of Gayle, Iris’s daughter, illuminate each other’s aspirations, joys, sufferings and conflicts. The cross­commentary also uncovers limitations in the women’s understanding of themselves and others, and their moral failings. Ultimately Bush Oranges affirms the title metaphor of Parachute Silk, since although superficially fragile the wom­ en’s relationships prove to be strong and supporting. Bush Oranges evokes Townsville and Magnetic Island sights and sounds and the feel of tropical houses with an affection that rebuffs the pragmatism common in earlier narratives of the North. Janette Turner Hos pital Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne but grew up in Bris­ bane and commenced teaching in 1963, aged twenty, at a high school in Mossman. Her fiction reflects the many countries that she has lived in or visited, and its international scope transcends the notion of a regional literary sisterhood. Her novels Charades (1988), The Last Magician (1992) and Oyster (1996) are set partly or wholly in Queensland, which she recognises as a central imaginative resource. As the narrator in her story ‘Litany for the Homeland’ asserts,‘The world spins in the margins of space, Australians float in the edges of the world, Queenslanders live in the rind of Australia, I have always drawn breath in the cracks of Queensland.’114 Five of Turner Hospital’s stories use her North Queensland expe­ rience as a setting or metaphor. Her first short story, ‘You Gave Me Hyacinths’, written about 1971, is set in a ‘hot and steamy’ cane­growing town.115 The narrator, a young female teacher from a religious back­ ground, forms a friendship with Dellis, a disadvantaged pupil. A shared

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swim in Reef­protected seas and a beautiful gift of Cooktown orchids come to symbolise the narrator’s sexual and emotional awakening. ‘The Last of the Hapsburgs’, first published twenty years later in Isobars and also set in the Mossman district, transforms elements from ‘Hyacinths’ into a critique of regional mores.116 When an older teacher, Lucia Dav­ enport, encourages her pupils, a Jewish girl and an Aboriginal girl, by swimming with them in a rainforest pool, youths led by the policeman’s son violently interrupt the idyll and desecrate the natural scene. A third North Queensland story, ‘The Second Coming of Come­by­Chance’, also published in Isobars, heightens Turner Hospital’s perception of an entrenched regional propensity to violence.117 Adeline Capper, an alco­ holic former teacher who has lived most of her life in Townsville, returns to the fictional township of Come­by­Chance, sunken decades earlier in the Burdekin Dam. She recalls how as a young teacher she befriended Aboriginal pupils and their families, and was later raped by a drunken police sergeant and constable intent on enforcing unwritten race­ relations laws. In ‘North of Nowhere’, first published in 1993, Bethesda, an eighteen­year­old dental assistant, escapes from Mossman to Cairns as a step towards fulfilling her dream of enrolling in a Brisbane univer­ sity.118 Under a show of affection, her drug­addict brother robs her of her week’s wages. Finally, ‘Cape Tribulation’, first published in Westerly in 1997, extends Turner Hospital’s dystopic perspective on the tropical North by drawing ironically on Captain Cook’s names for coastal fea­ tures. The Reef, often seen in regional writing as a zone of freedom but perceived by Cook as a labyrinth, is reinstated as a metaphor for confine­ ment as the story’s protagonist slips into insanity: Brian is wedged into the reef, he cannot move. He can feel the spiked coral, the way the panic fish dart, the clamshell pincer at his heart. Brian’s under, he is fighting for his life.119 Xavier Herbert and Thea Astley In contrast with much of the regional fiction so far discussed, the work of the two most significant novelists to write in North Queensland in the latter part of the twentieth century, Xavier Herbert and Thea Astley, shares a haunting sadness that, despite Herbert’s energy and Astley’s wit,

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verges on despair. Both writers create memorable scenes of bitter pathos, and for their protagonists rescue or salvation of whatever kind usually comes too late. The lost opportunities that characterised the European settlement of the land are foregrounded in Herbert’s major novels, and a similar awareness of an unredeemable loss haunts Astley’s work. Xavier Herbert (1901–84), born in Geraldton in Western Australia, lived and worked in Melbourne, Sydney and Darwin before moving in 1946 to Redlynch, north­west of Cairns. At Redlynch he wrote all the work that followed his first novel, Capricornia (1938).120 Herbert’s writing, often published under pseudonyms, began with occasional journalism and short stories that were collected and edited by Russell McDougall in South of Capricornia (1990).121 The only story with a definite North Queensland setting is ‘The Flying Fat Boy’, about a fat pilot whose lack of confidence made him eat too much, and who overcame the problem after a scary episode in the air between Cairns and Coen. Herbert’s major novels, Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country (1975), examine the interactions of Indigenous and non­Indigenous people in north­west Australia, and the effect of events from the 1880s to 1942 on the social, economic and political fabric. Poor Fellow My Country, a mammoth work, covers the last six years of the period, and concentrates much of its anger on the decadent and exploitative con­ trol from the southern states and the new invasion of the land, not by the Japanese but by overseas interests.122 Both novels create memorable characters in a richly satiric narrative that barely conceals a passionate despair at the tragedies caused by greed and stupidity. Capricornia is the more attractive book, not only because its narrative and meaning are contained within a manageable length but because the characters are given voices of their own. Norman Shillingsworth, the son of a young railway official and an Aboriginal woman, is sent to Port Zodiac, once ‘a Corroboree Ground of the Larrapuna Tribe’, where his personal­ ity, education and skills, acceptable in middle­class Melbourne, are no defence against Capricornia’s racism. Norman’s eventual good fortune is not shared by Tocky, the Aboriginal girl whom he finds, as the novel ends to the dismal cry of the crow, a heap of bone and rags together with their baby, in a rusted tank where she had sheltered from the police. As a stage play scripted by Louis Nowra in 1988, Capricornia’s

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account of European treatment of Aboriginal people aroused greater sympathy than the novel could do in the 1930s.123 Poor Fellow My Country is a remarkable achievement but is marred as a human story and as a socio­political chronicle by the intrusive domi­ neering voice and opinions of Jeremy Delacy, created by Herbert as an enlightened grazier who shares the author’s publicly espoused convic­ tions. The tribal execution of Jeremy’s part­Aboriginal son Prindy and the torture, rape and execution of Prindy’s part­Indian wife Savitra are no less horrendous because they result from human error and the chaos of race relations. Herbert’s Soldiers’Women (1961) grimly recreates the wartime occu­ pation of Sydney by American and Australian soldiers and the effect of their frenetic sexuality on the sexuality of women.124 The planets Mars and Venus symbolise the malignant influence of fate on the human psyche. The adolescent girl Pudsey Batt is one of the earliest depic­ tions of a young psychopathic murderer whose acts, partly due to the morbid and licentious spirit of the wartime city, are made both com­ prehensible and shocking. The stylistically experimental novella Seven Emus (1959) and the short stories in Larger than Life (1963) employ the macabre humour and touches of lyricism that characterise all Herbert’s work.125 The autobiography Disturbing Element (1963) indicates some of the sources of Herbert’s inspiration, and in its energy, characters and realistic dialogue closely resembles the fictional writing.126 Thea Astley, who died in Byron Bay in 2004, was born in Brisbane in 1925 and for many years lived for at least part of the year at Kuranda, a rainforest township overlooking Cairns. Her novels and short fiction are not confined to a North Queensland setting, but so many of them do recreate the landscapes, characters and lifestyles of the north that she is rightly considered the major contemporary chronicler of this region. Astley’s fourteen novels and a collection of short stories, along with other short fiction and critical work, have won her many literary awards and other honours, including the Patrick White Award in 1989. Girl with a Monkey (1958), set in Townsville where Astley had been a young teacher, presents the first of several unequal love relationships found in her novels. The love of the uneducated council worker, Harry, for Elsie, a teacher, is a passion Elsie cannot return, despite her sympathy

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for him. In one of the many moments of understated pathos in Astley’s writing, Harry races alongside the departing train that carries Elsie to Brisbane and throws a packet through the window: ‘Elsie! Elsie! Here’s some fruit I brung yer.’127 A Descant for Gossips (1960), televised for the ABC in 1983, also describes, with greater satire, the life of schoolteachers in a small country town. Helen Striebel is separated from her colleague Robert Moller by vicious, petty gossip.128 Another casualty is the stu­ dent Vinny Lalor whose loneliness is assuaged by Helen’s interest in her. Helen leaves for Brisbane without telling Vinny, who finds abandoned in Helen’s emptied hotel room the tiny china basket of flowers that Vinny had given her. The Well Dressed Explorer (1962) centres on the journalist George Brewster, as his career and empty love affairs carry him from one Australian city to another. Essentially shallow and faithless to his wife, George is still a pathetic figure: ‘All his life he had a convenient blind­ spot about the hurts he dealt out and even when the victim harped on it and dragged the wounded part under his good eye, he would refuse to admit it.’ As he dies, the nurse feels the last beats of his pulse ‘like the tini­ est of brum watches’.129 These themes resonate throughout Astley’s work: the hurts inflicted inadvertently and deliberately on others, the terri­ ble shallowness underlying the inability to identify imaginatively with others, and the destruction of others and of the self by wrongly con­ ceived actions. Most of her narratives are set in subtropical and, more frequently, tropical environments. The uncontrollable fecundity of the tropics, their uncaring seductiveness and casual destruction, image the novels’ view of the universe and of the humans who inhabit it. In The Slow Natives (1965) and A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968), some characters comprehend their failings, misunderstandings and stupidity after a disaster or natural cata­ clysm. In The Slow Natives, only after the teenage Keith Leverson loses his leg in a joy­riding accident does his father understand that he had failed to give his son ‘the sort of discipline . . . [he] wanted more than anything in the world’.130 In A Boat Load of Home Folk, a cyclone reveals to a boatload of assorted travellers something of themselves. Lake, a semi­ exiled priest, is only one of Astley’s religious figures who should have special awareness of their own hearts and minds but who sometimes spectacularly fail to live by even atheistic standards of human conduct.131

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The Acolyte (1972) displays, through the people that surround a gifted and twisted blind pianist, how our needs allow others to exploit our loyalty and inflict hurt.132 Astley’s most powerful writing begins with A Kindness Cup (1974), the story collection Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979) and An Item from the Late News (1982), all set in North Queensland.133 Whether shown by the deliberate murder of an Aboriginal tribe in A Kindness Cup or the destruction of the innocent Lunt, a victim of Dorahy’s enraged attempt to revenge the earlier crime, in these and later novels hate, anger, stupidity and cruelty are found in all but a few almost saintly Astley characters. As in Herbert’s novels, in Astley’s later writing there is often a bitter aware­ ness of the postcolonial heritage and its effect on the lives of Indigenous and non­Indigenous people. Past and present cruelty in An Item from the Late News testifies that nothing changes, the death of Wafer at the hands of bully boys (assisted by the stupidity of an educated, jealous girl) merely replicating the deaths of the Aboriginal people. Beachmasters (1985), a fic­ tional account of an attempted rebellion in Vanuatu, also has postcolonial awareness, and presents a similar but varied range of bad and well­ intentioned characters, sometimes craven, sometimes heroic, of which the boy Gavi is the most memorable.134 A later postcolonial critique and exposé appear in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), a moving, fic­ tionalised story about the attempt of Palm Islanders to remove a crazed and brutal white superintendent from the island, unwillingly inhabited by an unhappy mix of Aboriginal and Islander peoples of different tradi­ tions and customs.135 Learning is possible in Astley’s novels, and when the crippled Keith Leverson reappears as the narrator in Hunting the Wild Pineapple, although he is not always a philosophic or even compassionate observer, he has obviously matured from the wayward teenager of The Slow Natives. Sev­ eral memorable male characters occur in It’s Raining in Mango (1987), like the idealist Wafer, who seeks isolation and peace in North Queensland from shocking European cruelties, and Reever, the hippie conserva­ tionist idealist, a descendant of a mixed bag of strong and weak North Queensland pioneers.136 Macintosh Hope in Vanishing Points (1992) inadvertently betrays his last name by escaping to his own tiny island in the Reef and establishing a maze and a kind of fort (equipped with

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comforts essential to a cultured fellow) from which to defy loud, crass tourists on a neighbouring island.137 In many later Astley novels, however, women sometimes are the quick­ est learners, and a few women throughout the opus are more admirable than the men. Julie Truscott, the narrator in the second part of Vanishing Points, is one woman who finds some peace as neighbour to the sisters at Bukki mission, some of Astley’s rare examples of sincere religious adherents. Although Belle in Reaching Tin River (1990) stumbles into an infatuation with the writer Gaden Lockyer in her quest to understand herself through partly re­enacting her mother’s escape to the hills, she eventually finds some contentment in the small boarding­house at Tin River.138 Coda (1994) is centred on the last years of the valiant Kathleen who completes a little odyssey to return to her home to find it empty, awaiting demolition by her developer politician son­in­law. Techni­ cally semi­demented but spiritually intact, Kathleen escapes from the ‘wonderful’ retirement home found by her daughter and embarks for Magnetic Island.139 A younger escapee is Janet in Drylands (1999), find­ ing sustenance in the poetry and fiction of her years of reading, and sardonically starting ‘a book for the world’s last reader’. Drylands satirises electronic media, technology and pulp fiction, but revisits also the theme of the illiterate handicapped when Janet discovers after her impulsive marriage to Ted that he cannot read. Like much of Astley’s writing, Drylands points to careless neglect of a precious heritage denied to some; here it is the neglect of traditional literacy in the pursuit of a new literacy of technology, which holds little promise of the enrichment offered by the literature that sustains so many of Astley’s characters.140 The themes, although not the values, of Herbert’s and Astley’s novels appear fatalistic, and, especially in Capricornia, Poor Fellow My Country, A Kindness Cup and An Item from the Late News, the defeat of goodness sometimes seems to be effected by a macabre deus ex machina. The force of these novels, however, resides in the fact that human error of judgment is always the final cause of the tragedy.

Tropical musings: North Queensland poetry Poetry and verse written in North Queensland by resident or itinerant poets show very few clear regional tendencies or idiosyncrasies. Many

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poems do record something of the vivid landscapes of the North and its climatic regions and lifestyles. Although there does not appear to have emerged a distinctive poetry like that identified on the central Queens­ land coast, the coral reefs, rainforests and dry inland are commemorated often enough to constitute minor genres. Moreover, one of the few attributes shared by many poems written by long­term residents is a controlled lyricism that is touched by a dry realism. Titles like Victor Kennedy’s Cyclone (1949), Hugh Skinner’s Rain Forest Musings (1991) and Sybil Kimmins’s Tropical Musings (c. 1993) suggest close identification with the North.141 The anthology North of Capricorn: An Anthology of Verse (1988) and the collection Three North Queensland Poets (1990) demonstrate the range of poetic forms and themes used in the North, although the three poets, Stefanie Bennett, R. G. Hay and Anne Lloyd, are also claimed by other regions.142 In the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, lyrics and ballads were the chosen forms, but by the 1970s verse forms had expanded, although the ballad and lyric predominated. Ballads are still popular and balladists like Richard Magoffin, Ron Edwards and Dan Sheehan are household names. Some publication of verse was always possible in North Queensland. As in other colonial communities, local newspapers from Mackay to Port Douglas, including those in the hinterland, offered a limited outlet for verse, and local printers often acted as publishers, as D. W. Hastings did for Gilbert White’s Night, and Other Verse (1897).143 Many writers sought publication in southern papers and journals like the Sydney Bulletin, The Lone Hand and Steele Rudd’s Magazine. By the mid­twentieth century, however, regional papers printed no verse other than the rare bush ballad or light­hearted stanzas about some local occasion. Writing groups did put out booklets with members’ contributions, and by the 1970s James Cook University in Townsville, followed by the Cairns campus in the 1980s, actively promoted the publication of poetry from North Queensland, interstate and over­ seas. The journal LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland), established in 1971, and an occasional verse publication by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, both at James Cook University, as well as small press ventures in the larger centres, now offer the opportunity for

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regional poets to publish in the North as well as broaching the outlets in the South. Among the earliest North Queensland work of some quality and with regional marks is that of John Knight (d. 1901) whose sonnet ‘On the “Great Barrier Reef,” off the Queensland Coast’ anticipates the Reef poems of the southern poet Mark O’Connor by some hundred years.144 The poetry of Townsville­born E. M. England (1899–1981) includes three collections, The Happy Monarch and Other Verses (1927), Queensland Days (1944) and Where the Old Road Ran and Other Poems (1970).145 England’s poems reflect her delight in riding through the Queensland countryside in all seasons, and her sympathy with men and women in their daily occupations. North Queensland has some claim to Victor Kennedy (1895–1952), who edited his magazine Northern Affairs between 1931 and 1932. Kennedy collected in Cyclone (1949) verses that celebrate ‘the golden air of Farthest North’, the Palmer River goldfields and ‘the summer smile’ at Cairns and Innisfail, and asks, ‘Ah me, when tropic calls ring clear can southern pleas prevail?’146 The verse of Colin Bingham reflects his thoughtful, committed faith and a critical interest in social and political affairs. His university poems, Marcinelle and Other Verses (1925), are those of an idealistic, romantic young man celebrating life but wistfully aware of the certainty of death.147 A Book of Verse (1929) shows some disillusionment, as in ‘Sonnet IV’, which asks, ‘What wish for in the songs of this our land, / Where poets from the lips of night have won / The story of its tropic conquest’, and gives the answer, ‘The voice of him who knows reality’.148 In Sixteen Poems (1940), the awareness of imminent war includes a reflection on the ear­ lier war, with the suggestion that the soldiers’ death ‘on the rampart­hills’ is due not to ‘love of country, god, / But mateship and the urge of being man’.149 Decline of Innocence and Other Poems (1970) is a mature collection with more social criticism, as in ‘Geography, 1967’. ‘Satellite in Orbit, 1963’ compares the passing of the insignificant man­made satellite, ‘cold soundless like a portside light’, with the remembrance of Halley’s comet that ‘streamed the long sky with incandescence’.150 Of the earlier poets, England and Bingham published the most memorable collections of verse, but there were others before 1950 who

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wrote some vivid lyrics about North Queensland. Hardly unique to the region, yet noticeable by the frequency with which it occurs, is the ten­ dency to associate some observed natural phenomenon with a lifting or engagement of the spirit, in a way which suggests that the environ­ ment resists attempts to use it as a background for human thoughts, and instead actively commands attention and insists on effecting some change in the observer. This is seen in Nancy Francis’s ‘Sunrise at Cairns’ and, in a different mode, in the early humorous couplets of Philip Lorimer (1843–97), whose ‘Queensland’ chronicles every known and imagined impediment to easeful living.151 The enormous contribution to Australian culture made by C. B. (Clem) Christesen through his periodical Meanjin tends to overshadow his own creative writing. Christesen was born in Townsville, which he continued to revisit, and much of his poetry retained the influence of the North, as in the dialogue of voices ‘Foxes in the Mango­Tree’, ‘Galahs in Slow Flight’ and ‘Summer Night’.152 The burgeoning of regional poetry in the 1970s was due to many factors, including the role of the James Cook University, visits from poets and poets­in­residence, poetry readings, some arts funding for workshops, and the development of publication outlets. A resurgence of interest in poetry throughout Australia in the 1960s also reached North Queens­ land and brought more experimentation with form and subject and the deployment of sentence structures. In effect, poetry became more sophisticated. Among the poets who did not publish collections but had considerable influence in the region was Noel Macainsh in the English Department at James Cook University. Macainsh came from Melbourne with a well­established reputation as a poet and with fluency in German and a first­hand understanding of the developments in poetry on the European continent.While publishing mainly in the South, he also supported LiNQ with prose criticism and poetry, often finding his tone in the half­seduc­ tive, half­repellent impact of North Queensland aridity and lushness. His ‘The Mango Tree’, accurately shaping on the page the foliage and knobby trunk of the ubiquitous icon of the north, inspired emblematic attempts by many other poets.The poem was grounded on the lines ‘(mangoes über alles) / for holy holy Queensland (the North) all rights reserved’.153

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In an early issue of LiNQ Macainsh elaborated on similar perceptions of North Queensland society and culture.The spirit of the North, he felt, was ‘that of an eventide home for old folks’ and the ‘appropriate literature is evensong, retrospect, swan­song of a “culture” in the late­phase. One gets the impression that the tone is set by old men, reluctantly coping with the proddings of progress from an outside, younger world’.154 If there was some truth in this in 1972, there was soon to be a younger generation taking the lead in cultural matters. In the early 1970s, North Queensland printers typesetting poems for literary magazines assumed that their duty was to censor material they considered unsavoury, but such attitudes were hardly tenable a few years later. External and inter­ nal influences brought both environmental conservationists and cultural progressives like Macainsh himself. Another poet who helped to create a high critical expectation among northern poets is Robert Handicott, who also publishes in southern out­ lets and has produced three collections, Small Beer (1982), North, South and Elsewhere (1988) and The Worry Egg (1998).155 Handicott’s poems respect the precision of language and the result is paradoxically to reveal that there are more dimensions to words than late­twentieth­century theorists dreamed of. From whimsical self­deprecation to sensitive depic­ tions of childhood truths and international subjects like the German film director Leni Riefenstahl, Handicott’s poems seldom fail to arrest and illuminate. Stefanie Bennett was born in Townsville and lived and worked in Townsville and on Magnetic Island in the 1970s, although she is now more readily identified with the poets and artists of the Maleny dis­ trict in south­east Queensland. Nevertheless, her work in the 1970s as a writer, and as a long­distance tutor in creative writing at James Cook University, encouraged higher achievement in many writers from Mt Isa to the coast. Strong in social commitment and deeply spiritual, Bennett’s poetry has been published in at least eight collections. Her poems have universal themes and show little influence of specific localities, although the images are grounded in real scenes and landscapes. Among the poets responding to local influences were David Foott, a co­founder of LiNQ, Desmond Petersen, Wayne Murphy, Peter Bell, Helen Allan and Maria Fresta. Creative writing classes at the prison on

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the outskirts of Townsville resulted in the publication of several fine poems by Robin Thurston and E. W. Merlehan. The journal Black Voices, established by students and Noel Loos at the College of Advanced Edu­ cation, encouraged some eloquent poems by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander poets, including Lele Ara’s ‘The Home I Prapa Miss’ and ‘The Morning Glory’, Anne Mairu­Kaczmarek’s ‘Memories’, and Gata Alfred’s ‘Freedom of Choice’.156 Bobbi Sykes, born in Townsville, published one of the finest examples of Black writing in Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions (1979).157 By the mid­1990s, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers were initiating their own publications, such as Inside My World (1995) by the Cairns poet Nicole Williams.158 By the 1980s poetry was being written in North Queensland with some talent and assurance. The poets were alert to the stimuli of their regional environment but were also aware of the ebb and flow of themes, styles and attitudes, and the publication possibilities, found in the south­ ern cities. Poets who began publishing in early issues of LiNQ include Maria Fresta and Ted Nielsen. Fresta’s ‘To the Girls Who Sit in Bamaga Hospital’ is a simple tribute to pregnant teenage girls, and ‘For My Father’ weaves Italian phrases with English in a moving elegy.159 Nielsen wryly but not cynically embraces the contemporary and its technologies, ena­ bling his ironic idealism and lyricism to survive intact to the cutting edge of the present. Like Fresta, Nielsen prefers clarity of phrase and shape, even when he uses half­sentences to mimic the frenetic impact of an age battered by high­powered transport, electronics and nuclear energy. The neat and thoughtful ‘Infotech’ epitomises the tone of Nielsen’s collection, Search Engine (1999): ‘you ask the search engine to look for regret / & it sends you the whole web’.160 Rob Riel’s For As Long As You Burn (1999) also summarises wry personal and social insights in precise and shapely poems.161 Joan Davis, another early contributor to LiNQ, encouraged other writers through her participation in literary radio sessions and writers’ groups. As a speaker of Indonesian, Davis collaborated with Iem Brown to translate the work of twelve Indonesian poets, and the result is Di Serambi: On the Verandah, A Bilingual Anthology of Modern Indonesian Verse (1995). The variety of subject and tone of the poems in Di Serambi is reflected in the clear, flexible style of the translations.162

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Fiona Perry, a younger poet publishing both locally and in the South, has included in her collection Pharaohs Returning (1991) some fine lyrical dialogues for historical women figures, as well as other lyrics and elegies with a delicate feeling for language.163 With similar deft assurance and often with an ironic feminist perspective, Tessa Theocharous’s collection Psyche (1995) includes several pieces in which sensuous energy emerges more impressively because accompanied by critical acuteness.164 Like the collections of Perry and Theocharous, Gina Mercer’s The Ocean in the Kitchen (1999) and Rebecca Edwards’s Eating the Experience (1996) and Scar Country (2000) are typical of the best of contemporary poetry informed by a specific woman’s experience. The work of Mercer and Edwards is well known in the South and both have had a signifi­ cant influence in the region through their teaching. Edwards’s poetry is strongly imaged and the experiences it evokes include childbirth and parenthood. The title poem in Eating the Experience indicates that the identity of writer is inextricable from the identity of woman: ‘Never lend your cock to a poet, dear / she’ll snap it off and scrawl it dry / next time there’s no pen handy . . .You don’t want to know / what she’d do with your heart.’165 Observation of external life grounds firmly the expres­ sion of emotion and locates the poetry in a real environment: ‘Even the geckoes sleeping unafraid on the walls don’t comfort me’.166 Although a poem by Edwards or Mercer may declare that the writer is a ‘feminist’, this commitment serves as a focus not as a restriction, and sharpens the moments of experience observed. Mercer’s The Ocean in the Kitchen, as the title implies, reveals the universal experience in the personal domestic moment. Some lines may carry a bitter observation, but the overall tone is celebratory of parenthood, relationships and the apparently small but significant pleasures of ordinary life: ‘yeah my compost heap inspires me / living proof that nothing is waste / decay is noble’. The poem ‘a glass of water and a bed with clean sheets’ suggests ‘a new religion’, in which the one strict rule is ‘No Deliberate Hurting’ and the important satisfactions of life lie in appreciating how the sacred is found in ‘everyday tea­leaf­sized revelations’.167 If it were possible to indi­ cate a strength common to collections by North Queensland poets in the last decade, it would be a calm assurance in the crafting of the poetry and a quiet, usually slightly self­deprecatory wisdom in the thinking.

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Conclusion North Queensland does not have a high profile in world literature, yet the prose and poetry produced here since first settlement constitute a unique and diverse body of writing. Many works show an awareness of the region’s physical and imaginative distinctiveness from other Queensland regions. The writings range from state­sponsored journals of explora­ tion to domestic narratives and poems by marginalised women writers. They include amateur reminiscences, sentimental lyrics and ballads, and sophisticated modern fiction. Doctrinaire works position themselves beside intensely personal writings, while texts that uphold economic and political power structures confront others that radically challenge these structures. While some works convey a disinterested delight in the North’s varied landscapes and in the complex difference of its flora and fauna, others bear witness to their authors’ need to dominate the land or simply to survive here. Some literary visitors or immigrants to the region attained liberation from urban restrictions in the South, whereas others found variations on, and even an intensification of, the old themes of oppression and violence. North Queensland writing provides insights into the contending subliminal forces that continue to shape the region’s politics and history.

PART 5: Statewide Themes

‘Bitin’ Back’: Indigenous Writing in Queensland Maggie Nolan This chapter explores the nature of Indigenous literary writing and its preoccupations.The literature is informed by the experiences of the per­ sonal, the familial and the community, and enlarges the meanings of both the literary and the political because Indigenous writing is part of, not separate from, the daily lives and struggles of its authors. Related to this is the question of the sacred, and Indigenous people’s relationship to the land is an abiding preoccupation of the writing explored in this chapter. Literature, and the way it is read, is intimately related to Indigenous efforts to achieve cultural autonomy and calls for recognition of difference and shared humanity. It thereby becomes a tool of recognition, acknowledg­ ment and transformation, producing new kinds of knowledges and new kinds of readers. An analysis of the reception of Indigenous literature tells us a great deal about the shifting and contradictory nature of race relations in Australia, with their concomitant assumptions, anxieties and stereo­ types. Certainly, recent interest in Indigenous literature has almost as much to tell us about white guilt and desire, the politics of authentic­ ity, and the complexities involved in the assignation of cultural value, as it does about Indigenous cultural and literary expression. In spite of this, Aboriginal literature reveals – and has led to the widespread recognition of – Queensland’s Indigenous heritage; it has transformed contemporary understandings of Queensland history and identity in

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ways that have sometimes made non­Indigenous Queenslanders feel uncomfortable. After colonisation, neither pre­colonial boundaries between commu­ nities nor the rights of those communities to their traditional lands were recognised. Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, moreover, are diverse culturally and linguistically, and there were and are dozens of lan­ guage groups within the borders of what is now Queensland. In spite of this diversity, one thing that all Indigenous Queenslanders have in com­ mon is the shared history of brutal frontier violence in the nineteenth century followed by state­based regulatory regimes of control and sur­ veillance that have governed their lives under the shadow of ‘the Act’. In 1895 the Queensland government commissioned Archibald Meston to report on Aboriginal conditions in the north and the role of the missions, and the resulting Act, the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Bill (1897), determined the government of Aboriginal popula­ tions in Queensland until the 1960s. Indigenous Queenslanders became subject to a state­driven system of segregation, surveillance and control. By the time many of the controls of the Act were repealed, in 1965, after pressure from the Queensland Council for the Advancement of Aborigi­ nes and Torres Strait Islanders (QCAATSI), the Director of Native Affairs Office (DNAO) managed a network of segregated community insti­ tutions, nine missions and five government institutions, which housed 8,467 Aborigines in impoverished conditions. This history has been recorded in the work of Indigenous historians like Bill Rosser, Jackie Huggins and Willie Thaiday, whose book, Under the Act, was published by the North Queensland Publishing Company in 1981. The literature considered in this chapter emerged from, and is inter­ twined with, this shared history, which perhaps explains why the writing is invariably political and the community so central to it. Certain themes recur: the separation and institutionalisation of children and their dev­ astating effects (loss of culture, family and identity as well as ongoing difficulty parenting), dispossession, state surveillance and regulation, the simultaneous regulation and exploitation of female sexuality, the exploita­ tive conditions of employment, and the corrupt managing of wages. And yet one of the most striking features of the literature is its diversity and the extent to which Indigenous authors stretch the definition of

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literature and genres in ways that challenge non­Indigenous readers. And while the sheer volume of Indigenous literature in Queensland prohibits detailed readings of individual texts, the chapter will enable readers, both Indigenous and non­Indigenous, to experience a sense of the diversity and innovation of work that falls under the rubric of Aboriginal writing in Queensland.

Oral song cycles and traditional stories While perhaps not strictly speaking literature, pre­contact song poems are the heritage from which contemporary Indigenous writers emerge. Contemporary access to these song poems, and the ways of life they reflect, is available through edited and translated collections, most notably Dyirbal Song Poetry by the Dyirbal people of North Queensland.The col­ lection is edited by R. M. Dixon and Grace Koch, although, as the editors assert, ‘The real authors of this book are the nineteen singers who sang the songs it contains’.1 And yet, even ‘author’ might not be quite the right word here, for these songs have, for the Dyirbal people, a mystical origin and significance not attributable to human agency, and have been passed down through many generations. They deal with the origins and habits of animals, techniques of hunting, love songs, songs to injure and songs to placate. The dynamism of the tradition is also evident, for, although most of the songs are related to traditional practices, some relate to white con­ tact and its aftermath, positive and negative, comic and tragic. While the texts necessarily remove the song poems from the contexts in which they were produced and performed, and insert commentaries that might be interpreted as interventionist, they do, nonetheless, broaden our under­ standing of a rich and diverse tradition, which connects contemporary Aboriginal writing to one of the oldest oral traditions in the world. Just as the song poems predate the British invasion, so too do the tra­ ditional stories. These stories are often categorised as children’s literature, despite the fact that the literature covered here operates in much more complex ways than such a categorisation suggests. In many ways, desig­ nating these stories as children’s literature operates as a form of white paternalism and reveals the lack of understanding about the role these stories play in Indigenous communities. Far from being merely children’s stories, they also serve to edify adults, point to social morals, and surround

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familiar places with significance and depth of tradition. Reading these stories from the printed page is inadequate, for they are stories to be told rather than read, and they foreground the places to which they belong, becoming links to those places. An early example is The Legends of Moonie Jarl (1964).2 Moonie Jarl (Wilf Reeves) is from the Butchulla people of Fraser Island, and while Moonie Jarl links his legends to the conven­ tions of fairytales and Greek mythology, his highly original retellings pay attention to the context in which stories are told and the role of the question and answer sessions that come after telling the story. The stories themselves are illustrated through painted patterns, which he refers to as sister paintings, and so the stories emerge in both words and pictures. In the work of writers like Dick Roughsey, Sylvia Cairns, Gordon Tulo and, more recently, the award­winning writers Boori Pryor, Narelle McRob­ bie and Selena Soloman, we can see the link between stories and survival: food, water, tools, weapons and the seasons are central to the stories, and all of these are intimately connected to social relations and the law, which are, in turn, products of relationships with the land. These stories link the past and the present, operating outside linear conceptions of narra­ tive and time, and they offer readers a reinvigorated sacred and ancestral tradition out of the disruption of colonisation.

Writing for publication Unlike the oral song cycles, and some of the traditional stories that are translated into English, the literature considered in the rest of the chapter is written and published in English, a language that necessarily plays an ambivalent role in the work of Indigenous writers, signifying both the loss of Indigenous languages and a tool of colonial control. Yet it is too simplistic to see Indigenous writing in English as somehow false or inau­ thentic, as some critics have done, for English is an adaptable language and becomes a tool of expression and communication. The writers dis­ cussed have made English their own, and in their hands English, in both its standard and non­standard forms, becomes a site of resistance, inspira­ tion and unpredictability. Many of the writers, particularly the older writers, had their first work published in the Indigenous journal Identity, edited by Jack Davis from 1971 to 1982. Since then, there have been some other Indigenous

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publishing ventures, most notably Cheryl Buchanan’s Murrie Coo­ee publishing house, and the North Queensland Publishing Company, which was set up by Indigenous people ‘to encourage, promote and publish Aboriginal and Islander people’. Jacaranda Press, as Oodgeroo’s publisher, played a key role in the publication of Indigenous writ­ ing. Magabala Books (founded in 1987), the Aboriginal Studies Press (founded in 1964) and the Institute of Aboriginal Development Press (founded in 1962) were established with an explicit charter to publish Indigenous writing from around the country. In Queensland, however, the most prolific publisher of Indigenous writing, from Queensland and elsewhere, has been the University of Queensland Press. Its Black Aus­ tralian Writers Series, launched in 1990, which evolved out of the annual David Unaipon Award for an unpublished manuscript by an Indigenous writer, established in 1988, has been the vehicle through which many of the writers mentioned in this chapter came into print.

Poetry Indigenous poetry in Queensland has been a blend of the political and the spiritual, to the extent that the division between these categories, usually easily separated in Western culture, is blurred, as identity and the land are central to both. So it should come as no surprise that all of Queensland’s Indigenous poets are also activists and educators. The publication of the work of Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuc­ cal) in the 1960s marks a significant moment in both Queensland’s and Australia’s literary and socio­political history. Oodgeroo’s work was pub­ lished just as Indigenous Queenslanders were emerging from the shadow of the Act, and soon after the establishment of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) within which Oodgeroo was a powerful and highly respected voice. Oodgeroo, who changed her name from Kath Walker in the 1980s, was born Kathleen Ruska to the Noonuccal people on Minjerribah (Strad­ broke Island) in 1920, and died in 1993. She grew up with her parents and five siblings, who instilled a strong sense of her Aboriginal identity. Her first collection of poetry, We Are Going (1964), the first published collection of poetry by an Indigenous Australian author, began with her famous ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’. The volume was reprinted seven

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times in seven months, and shocked and surprised audiences with its power, its protest and its sense of loss. This was followed by two more collections, The Dawn Is at Hand (1966) and My People (1970).3 Her first book of prose, Stradbroke Dreamtime, was published in 1972.4 If Oodgeroo’s poetry has been criticised as too naive and unsophis­ ticated, then Lionel Fogarty’s poetry has been accused of being too politicised and obscure. He has published several volumes of poetry, and a children’s book, Booyooburra: A Tale of the Wakka Murri, a story that he has characterised as both an allegory of colonisation and a tale of the impor­ tance of respect.5 Born on Waka Waka land at Cherbourg settlement, Fogarty has been active in many of the political struggles of Indigenous people in southern Queensland, including the land rights movement, the setting up of Aboriginal health and legal services, and the bring­ ing to awareness of black deaths in custody, an issue brought into focus by the death of his brother, Daniel Yock, in the back of a police van in 1993. Lionel Fogarty is one of the most innovative and prolific Australian poets of his generation. His poetry is multi­sourced and revolutionary and is highly verbal in the sense that it is poetry to be heard rather than read: witnessing Fogarty reading his poetry is an unforgettable experi­ ence of extraordinary intensity. A discussion of Fogarty’s work would not be complete without acknowledging Cheryl Buchanan’s Indigenous publishing house, Murrie Coo­ee, through which much of Fogarty’s work – including Kargun (1980), Kudjela (1983) and Jagera (1980) – has appeared. Many readers have been struck by Fogarty’s non­Standard English, which he wields like a weapon in the face of the ongoing onslaught of invasion and occupation, almost creating a new language. After all, as he asserts in ‘Tired of Writing’: To write I have to use a medium that is not mine If I don’t succeed, bear with me. I see words beyond any acceptable meaning And this is how I express my dreaming . . .

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While much of the critical focus is on Fogarty’s militant rage, his poetry is also about love and respect and justice, and is deeply spiritual in the sense that it is conscious of its place in an ancient oral story­telling tra­ dition that has emerged from a relationship to the land. In this sense, it shares some similarities with John Graham’s ecologically sensitive poetry. Graham, of Waka Waka and Kombumeri descent, published Land Window, which was highly commended in the David Unaipon awards, in 1998.6 This combination of the political and the spiritual is evident in much Indigenous poetry in Queensland, and like the work of Oodgeroo and Fogarty there is a strong focus on the performative dimension. Maureen Watson, of Birri Gubba descent, is from a prominent Murri activist family and is recognised as an elder in the south­east Queensland region. In her oral recordings, including From Dreamtime to Spaceships (1984) and Kaiyu’s Waiting: An Aboriginal Story (1984), we get a glimpse of the power of these performances as she tells contemporary urban children’s stories about the importance of community, culture and cultural pride as well as understanding and empathy.7 Sam Wagan Watson’s Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight (2000) was the 1999 winner of the David Unaipon award.8 Watson, a descendant of the Mununjali and the Birri Gubba people, and son of legendary Queensland writer and activist Sam Watson, is another powerful performer of his poetry. The evocative imagery in his poems combines the outback and the urban, the natural and the mechanical, all against a background of deep humanism. Lisa Bellear’s Dreaming in Urban Areas was highly commended in the 1995 David Unaipon Award. Although born in Melbourne, Bellear was, like Oodgeroo, of the Noonuccal people. Unlike Oodgeroo, however, Bellear (1961–2006) was a member of the stolen generations, and her poetry is infused with fragmentation, soul­crushing racism, bureaucratic bewilderment and lost dreams.Yet Bellear’s poetry, which has been widely anthologised, has a stunning range of style and tone, moving between joy, humour, love, loss, grief and violent rage, all of which are held together by an intense immediacy. Sometimes achingly heartfelt and gently lyrical, sometimes stridently colloquial, her poems expose hypocrisy. In ‘Fashion Statement’, she challenges the corrupt complacency and denial of white feminists who are:

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Fantasising fanatically On how we women Are oppressed and in Our oppression we are United. She turns her critical gaze on bureaucrats, Indigenous and non­Indigenous, in ‘Mr Don’t Scratch My Rolex’, and on those who would appropriate Aboriginal spirituality in ‘Souled Out’. Her ‘Artist Unknown’, a poem dedicated to ‘all Indigenous / colonised artists’, links her own poetry to a wider ancestral tradition, even as it ‘reads like a memorial’. Her per­ spectives on these experiences and perceptions are expressed in ‘Grief ’: This is about me my life, my grief my need to maintain the capacity to love. And yet at the heart of this emotion is a warning, articulated most clearly in ‘Awake Our Warriors’, a poem she wrote for Gary Foley: Wounded dangerously Our warriors awake through the smog filled haze of colonisation.9

Life writing Since the late 1970s there has been an increase in output and a corre­ sponding groundswell of interest in Indigenous life writing in Australia. Although Western Australian writer Sally Morgan’s My Place (1986) is often seen as the watershed for such narratives, Indigenous writers in Queensland, especially women writers, began writing their own per­ sonal and cultural narratives of loss and survival under the ‘Act’ a decade earlier. These life writings challenge benign versions of Australian his­ tory by confronting readers with stories of the traumatic effects of Queensland’s governmental and church­based regimes of control over Indigenous Queenslanders. Community and spirituality, however, are

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key sources of strength that Indigenous people have drawn upon in the face of this. Running through these narratives are the themes of exploitation of Indigenous labour, sexual exploitation and control of Indigenous women, and the struggle to produce coherent identities, families and communities out of the practices of assimilation, segrega­ tion and separation. Indigenous life narratives are acts of testimony and remembrance in the face of a state­sanctioned campaign of forgetting and fragmentation: as such, they resist co­option into a comfortable narrative of redemption. Some critics have dismissed Indigenous life writing as inauthentic because it reproduces European genres and modes of self­knowledge. Such debates are clearly caught up with shifting ideological and aesthetic positions about authenticity, authority and patronage, and will remain an ongoing issue that writers, editors and publishers must carefully negoti­ ate.Yet while autobiography, as a genre and mode of self­knowing, has a history, that history is now enmeshed with Indigenous Australian knowl­ edges and modes of story­telling through which knowledge is shared and identities are asserted. The power of these Indigenous narratives of life in Queensland to challenge complacent understandings of both history and Indigenous identity on the part of non­Indigenous Queenslanders should not be discounted; to do so would itself risk being dangerously assimilatory. Many Indigenous life stories in Queensland are written by women whose lives began on government missions and / or in domestic labour, and who have risen to positions of prominence in their communities. Monica Clare’s Karobran: The Story of an Aboriginal Girl (1978) is a novel based closely on the author’s life, and is a story of almost total dispos­ session.10 ‘Karobran’ is a word that is translated as ‘togetherness’, and the novel does emphasise the central importance of Indigenous kinship. It opens in southern Queensland in the 1930s with the death of Isabelle’s white mother in childbirth and her father’s efforts to keep the fam­ ily together, a virtual impossibility for a single Aboriginal man in the Depression. Karobran was edited after Clare’s death, and it is hard to gauge the extent of editorial interference, although it has been argued that its social realist tone and class concern is more a reflection of the editor’s agenda than the author’s.

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Labumore (Elsie Roughsey) is a member of the Lardil people of Mornington Island, and her An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New (1984) recalls life on a mission on Mornington Island in the 1930s and 1940s. As in Clare’s novel, the world Roughsey inhabits is bewilder­ ing in its lack of justice, and much of the story is about her attempts to come to terms with white law. Unlike Clare, however, Labumore was not ‘stolen’, although she did spend time in a mission dormitory; she knew her language and culture and lived all her life on her traditional lands. As in the world of Karobran, the white world is characterised by fear, loneli­ ness and rigidity: ‘They are too much careless of love towards each other.’ There is a strong contrast between white ways and the old ways of life when ‘[e]verybody were real people’. For Elsie Roughsey, modern life is ‘the reckless life’ where people live with an ‘unhappy, sad, tired feeling’. As with Clare, Indigenous community is the source of strength and free­ dom and the loss of this is keenly felt as she attempts to piece together the fragments of a life that has been taken away: ‘The customs and laws and cultures are gone with the greatest people of the past.’ For Roughsey, who was brought up a Christian, attention to the world of the spirit is one of the ways through which Christianity is understood, and through­ out the book there is a message of reconciliation, a long time before the official national process was initiated.11 Marnie Kennedy’s Born a Half-Caste (1985) is dedicated to ‘my mother, my children and grandchildren, and my people’. A member of the Kalkadoon people, Kennedy asserts the truth of her story in the preface: ‘This story is true. It did happen and I was part of it.’ Kennedy’s short memoir traces her life from her birth on the bank of Coppermine Creek in Western Queensland in 1919 to Palm Island and to life as a domestic labourer on various stations throughout Queensland. On Palm Island, the Indigenous inhabitants experienced the hunger and the cruel and arbitrary punishments that much Indigenous life writing in Queens­ land explores: ‘We feared our own laws too,’ she writes, ‘but we knew what we were punished for.’ She also writes of the violence of white culture, and its obsession with cleanliness and sexual morality, as well as the peculiar position of Aboriginal people being objects of curiosity for white tourists. Like much Indigenous writing, the sense of loss Kennedy feels, both personal and cultural, pervades the narrative. She writes of the

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old ways: ‘Their stories were so beautiful and had a meaning and depth but are now ashes, lost forever.’ As the title suggests, Kennedy’s work also explores the fear, shame and humiliation attached to the figure of the ‘half­caste’: ‘I am neither white nor black but a new breed, to be pun­ ished along with our mothers for what we are . . . [This] new breed the white man created is considered to be dangerous.’12 Mabel Edmund’s No Regrets (1992), which was highly commended in the David Unaipon awards, tells the story of Edmund’s multifaceted life among Aboriginal and South Sea Islander communities. A born story­ teller as well as a nationally recognised painter, Edmund tells of her life as a sheep musterer, and her meeting with Digger Edmund, who brought her back to his South Sea Islander community on the Central Queensland coast. Edmund’s mother was of Aboriginal and German heritage and her father was a South Sea Islander, and No Regrets deals with the ambiguities of mixed heritage in an era of assimilation. Edmund’s second book, Hello, Johnny! Stories of My Aboriginal and South Sea Islander Families (1996), remi­ nisces about her father, father­in­law, husband and brother.13 Ruth Hegarty’s memoir, Is that You, Ruthie? (1999), won the David Unaipon award in 1998. Like many other memoirs, Is that You, Ruthie? bears witness for those who cannot and is written for the many mem­ bers of her family ‘who when they read this book will learn more about where we come from, which will help them to understand who they are’. Hegarty tells the story of her life as a ‘dormitory girl’ at the infamous Cherbourg mission in the 1930s, and recalls the pain of separation from her mother and the exploitation and humiliation of domestic labour. Hegarty’s story is testimony to the bonds that were formed at Cher­ bourg: she insists that this is not an individual story and draws upon others’ memories to tell her story. Like many other Indigenous women’s life stories, there is a tension between speaking for the self and speaking for or about the community. In this sense, Indigenous life writing stands in marked contrast to the highly individualised genre of autobiography, becoming instead a collective testimony to the lives of several women. Although Hegarty recalls the friendships and fantasies that helped to sustain the dormitory girls, she also remembers the cold, the hunger, the lack of privacy and the barbaric punishments, and she reflects on the effects of these privations on her life in the present: ‘These were the

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acts of people who felt that frightening us would give them control over us . . . We who lived through them will bear the scars of this treatment for the rest of our lives.’ And yet Cherbourg is a site of deep ambivalence. A virtual prison, where every aspect of their lives was controlled and regulated, it was also home: Our family backgrounds and circumstances were very different. But in spite of these very different beginnings we became a close­knit family whose bonding gave such strength and support that made bearable what could have been a very miserable and lonely existence in the dormitory.14 One of the most disturbing aspects of Hegarty’s story is the journey through the state archives as she attempts to piece together her life from fragmentary documents, turning these impersonal forms of surveillance and regulation into the materials out of which a sense of who she now is might emerge. This reminds us that narratives are also sites of power, and the production and storage of documents about individual Aboriginal lives were key technologies for the exercise of state power through much of the twentieth century. Some of the most moving passages in the mem­ oir emerge from this disjuncture between her memories and the blunt, callous reduction of her experience in state narratives. Yet Hegarty’s contemporary memoir rewrites this official state narrative, exposing the workings of official government modes of documenting Aboriginal lives: ‘Seeing that file there and all the information in it made me realise how much they controlled out lives . . . How ironic it turned out to be – here was material I could use to help me write my book.’15 Jackie and Rita Huggins, of the Pitjara / Bidjara and Birri Gubbu Juru, published Auntie Rita in 1994. Like other life narratives, Auntie Rita reveals the effects of Queensland government policy on the sto­ len generations and the impact on parenting, and on identity itself, of the loss of culture and language. It tells of racism, incarceration and the exploitation of domestic labour. Like Hegarty’s narrative, Auntie Rita also utilises the state archives. What makes this landmark narrative different is that it reconceptualises collaborative writing and the ethical and cul­ tural frameworks in which it is understood. Written by Rita Huggins, a

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Murri activist, elder and community leader in south­east Queensland, and her daughter Jackie Huggins, a prominent academic, activist and writer, Auntie Rita emerges out of a cross­generational dialogue which Jackie refers to as ‘fighting with our tongues’, as the book sets out to explore what Jackie Huggins calls ‘our mutual Aboriginality’. Initially, Jackie attempts to ‘translate’ her mother’s voice to ‘“protect” her from non­Aboriginal critics’. But she comes to accept that ‘I am not speaking for my mother, but to her, with her and about her’. The book explores the different relationships of the women to history, to family and to each other and celebrates the ‘precious and irreplaceable’ nature of ‘Aborigi­ nal ways of speaking’: much of the narrative is in non­standard English. Auntie Rita asserts cultural continuity in spite of interventionist policies designed to fragment Indigenous families. Jackie Huggins acknowledges the work of editor Alison Ravenscroft: ‘I had been cynical of white editorial intervention, but with Alison Ravenscroft we entered into a productive collaboration. The editing was unimposing and enabling, and there soon developed a trust between Rita, Alison and I.’16 Ellie Gaffney’s Somebody Now (1989) is one of the few life stories written by a Torres Strait Islander woman. While Somebody Now shares many themes with other Indigenous life writing – overcoming poor education and low expectations, the effects of racism and the disruption of traditional life – Gaffney, who is of mixed heritage, takes a particular interest in the long history of cultural exchange that has characterised life in the Torres Strait. Although life writing is a genre usually associated with women, Indig­ enous men in Queensland have also produced life stories. Wayne King’s groundbreaking autobiography Black Hours (1996) is a complex coming­ out story, where ‘coming out’ is as much about his Indigenous identity as it is about his sexuality. King was brought up in poverty in Ipswich with an alcoholic father and thirteen siblings, and dreamt of escape. His position as a gay Aborigine positioned him as doubly oppressed, as he faced racism in the gay community and homophobia in the Aboriginal community: ‘Gays may have been outsiders, but as a gay Aborigine, I might as well have been from Mars.’ Haunted by the past, King descends into alcoholism: ‘Australia, I realised, had been spared the racial violence of other countries because Aborigines had internalised their anger and

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sunk into alcoholism.’ Yet ultimately King’s story is one of overcoming adversity, as he travels all over the world in his job with the Department of External Affairs.17 Overcoming adversity is a theme that runs through life writing by Indigenous Queensland men. Bill Dodd’s Broken Dreams (1992), winner of the David Unaipon award in 1991, is the story of how his free­spirited and larrikin life as a stockman was changed after a diving accident that left him a quadriplegic.18 Albert Holt’s Forcibly Removed (2001)19 covers much of the same ground as Hegarty’s Is that You, Ruthie? Brought up in Cher­ bourg, Holt has many of the scars of physical and psychological abuse, and memories of humiliation and hunger. Yet, like Hegarty’s, this is also a story of cultural pride, and one of his most significant memories is of being told, ‘No matter what, never, ever, lose your identity.’ Boori Pryor’s autobiography Maybe Tomorrow (1998) comprises of personal reflections and anecdotes as he moves through his personal and spiritual journey from grief, to commitment and reconciliation. Pryor reminds us that all the study done on Indigenous people in Australia may be a way to ‘allow white people to avoid facing the reality that we are human beings, we are families, we are people who grieve for the loss of our loved ones’.20

Fiction A number of fiction writers published work in the 1990s, including Sam Watson, Herb Wharton, Alexis Wright, Melissa Lucashenko and Vivienne Cleven. Although diverse in style and scope, this writing is marked by a radical reworking of contemporary identity politics, and complicates simplistic understandings of an authentic and homogeneous Aboriginal identity, with questions of class, gender, sexuality and regionalism cutting across Indigenous identifications. These texts also challenge compla­ cent understandings of the Indigenous community, revealing tensions between the rural, the urban and the suburban, and exploring the causes and effects of unequal power relations within Indigenous communities. Many of these texts are yet to receive the serious scholarly attention they deserve, and it is important to note that many of these authors also write reviews and articles about a range of literary and political topics. Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung (1990), which won the Patricia Weickhardt award, is set in Brisbane and surrounds.21 The narrative energy

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and brutal eroticism give the novel a sense of urgency, an urgency which is also evident in Watson’s activist work on deaths in custody and police harassment. The Kadaitcha Sung interweaves realistic (in the European sense of the word) urban racial conflict with the supernatural, and con­ flates the present with the past within a contemporary form influenced by fantasy and science fiction. It opens by setting up a cosmology that seems both Indigenous and biblical. The white intruders, a fair­skinned tribe, are explained and situated within that cosmology, and the inter­ racial conflict in Australian history is framed in mythological terms as inter­tribal battles dominated by warrior codes and pre­existing laws that have little to do with European dominance, and which radically rework the representation of the Aborigine as long­suffering victim. The Kadaitcha Sung is a deeply contradictory novel, which may well be one of its strengths. Protagonist Tommy Gubba’s absolute hatred and rejection of all whites (‘migloos’) as evil and inadequate is in tension with the explicit representation of Tommy Gubba’s whiteness as being a source of potential power. These contradictions seem to be a result of the system and history of colonisation that necessarily produce such ambivalences. Many of the black characters, for example, feel contempt for their own people and what they have become in response to invasion. The novel also stresses two very different and incommensurate systems of law and justice through the well­meaning but ineffectual Irish lawyer, Jack Finlay, and his ‘dedication to a code that had all but devastated the land of Uluru’. Although white law prevails, in the final scene Tommy Gubba addresses the court: I say this, that you are like empty shells . . . My land and my spirit are in me and they are me. That is the way of my people and that is the way of my law. And you cannot take this thing from me. Because I am the dirt. I am the rock and the tree. I am the air and the rain. I am the land. And I say this to you migloo: you will be doomed to the end of time to wear the blood of my people.22 The novel is provocative. Extreme violence, including sexual violence, is represented graphically and pervades the novel, and there are few characters, especially male characters, who are not implicated in it. The

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Kadaitcha Sung defies easy interpretation because it simultaneously chal­ lenges and reasserts stereotypes of Aboriginality. A very different writer with a very different style, Herb Wharton is a distinctive voice in contemporary Australian fiction. Drawing on his life as a drover, rodeo­rider and horse­breaker, his books, including Unbranded (1992) (which was highly commended in the David Unaipon awards), Cattle Camp (1994), Where Ya’ Been, Mate? (1996) and Yumba Days (1999), can be seen as part of a tradition of yarn­spinning lar­ rikinism that moves across Indigenous and non­Indigenous cultures.23 Wharton, a Kooma man, tells memorable stories full of good humour and optimism, and celebrates the contribution of Aboriginal stockmen and women in Queensland’s pastoral and labour histories. If his books could be said to have a central message, it would be the importance of both education and laughter. Fiction is also strongly represented by Indigenous women. Melissa Lucashenko is of Bundjalung,Yuganmeh and European descent. In addi­ tion to her novels, Steam Pigs (1997), Killing Darcy (1998) and Hard Yards (1999), Lucashenko has also written short stories, book reviews and political commentary, and is a significant political activist. Her novels, which reveal a keen ear for dialogue and idiom, share a concern with the complexity of identity, as an interplay of identifications that cut across axes of gender, race, class, culture, sexuality, age, embodiment and spatial location, all of which are situated in historical processes of colonisation and dispossession. One of the most interesting aspects of Lucashenko’s fiction is the way that she seeks to expand the meanings of Aboriginality. And while Lucashenko treats the broad issues of alienation, loneliness, despair and hope, she positions them within explorations of issues influ­ encing Indigenous communities, and Indigenous women in particular, as they struggle for self­determination in the face of substance abuse, vio­ lence, poverty, racism and the pervasive effects of white systems of law. Steam Pigs received widespread acclaim. It won the Nita Dobbie Award for women’s fiction, was short­listed for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, and was highly commended in the David Unaipon awards.The ‘steam pigs’ of the title is ‘railwayman’s talk for something that doesn’t fit properly, a square peg in a round hole. A mongrel . . . A white blackfella’.The novel follows the story of seventeen­year­old Sue Wilson,

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‘a white blackfella’, who escapes, after an abortion, from her ‘too­large, too­poor family in a too­small’ north Queensland town, Townsville, to Logan City south of Brisbane. In the course of this narrative, the novel explores the prevalence and various manifestations of racism, the nor­ malised violence of working­class masculinity, substance abuse, police harassment, and the dynamics of domestic violence. While not shying away from the brutality of Sue’s life, instances of kindness and generosity of spirit flourish in the midst of this: Sue’s love of her nephews, her thirst for knowledge, and the strength of female solidarity. Feminism becomes a potential source of hope and subversion, yet the character of Kerry, a gay white social worker, is represented quite ambivalently. When, for exam­ ple, she harangues Sue about not responding positively enough to white dominance, Sue replies, ‘it’s not my fucken political system, it’s yours . . . it’s all migloo crap to me, just like a whitefella to make us into a tiny minority, and then say, come on, you can change the system – TRY HARDER!’.24 Killing Darcy (1998), a novel for young­adult readers, is set in an imag­ inary location in northern New South Wales.25 Darcy is an angry young gay Koori on parole looking for his mob and himself. His blood links are with the local saltwater people, but he has been raised in ‘red dirt country’. This search for selfhood, a strong theme through Lucashenko’s writing, is set within the framework of a metaphysical thriller related to a past massacre of local blacks. Hard Yards (1999), Lucashenko’s second novel for adults, tells the story of Roo Glover, a poor white kid in Bris­ bane, a product of the state’s adoption and correctional institutions.26 His Murri girlfriend, Leena, who is struggling to come to terms with the death in custody of her brother, announces that she is pregnant. Roo later finds out that his father is under investigation for the suspicious death of Leena’s brother.Through this narrative, Lucashenko explores the dynamics of guilt, shame and responsibility in the context of Australian history and its contemporary effects. The celebrated novel Plains of Promise (1997) by Alexis Wright, a Waanji woman from the Gulf of Carpentaria, was short­listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Age Book of the Year and the New South Wales Premier’s Awards. It begins in a fictional mission, St Domin­ ic’s, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where once again the mission is a prison and a site of hypocrisy and corruption. Although St Dominic’s is built

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on the tribal lands of some of the inmates, others are brought there forcibly from ancestral homelands elsewhere, and the ongoing effects of this forced displacement, combined with the systematic incitement of suspicion and jealousy among the inmates that results in internal hos­ tilities, drive the narrative. Against this background are the attempts by the Indigenous inhabitants to resist invasion in whatever way they can and to maintain their own spiritual and cultural integrity, traditions and knowledges – their sources of connection to each other, their ancestors and the land. The novel follows four generations of women who are torn away from each other and their homes through the practices of assimilation and successive bureaucracies and institutions. It explores the specific effects of these policies and practices on women whose lives and bod­ ies were objects of regulation, violent displacement and desire for both non­Indigenous and Indigenous men. Like much Indigenous writing in Queensland, Plains of Promise explores the ongoing legacy of the violence of colonisation, and the fragmentation and despair caused by bureaucratic intervention in Aboriginal lives. Wright has described her novel as ‘a call for mercy, a call for some understanding of what is happening to our people, what our condition is’.27 Plains of Promise has a complex narrative, a large cast of characters and multiple storylines. No simple conclusions are drawn and the narrative perspective is constantly shifting. This linear and often tragic narrative, however, is set against the story of the land in all its beauty and its own enduring and cyclical time, with the filling and emptying of an inland sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria, ‘the home of a great spirit – the Serpent, the greatest ancestral creator being’.28 The novel reminds us that this hauntingly beautiful land is alive with ancestral spirits, a dimension of the land that colonisation cannot eradicate. Vivienne Cleven’s Bitin’ Back (2001), which won the David Unaipon award in 2000, is a hilarious book that explores literary inspiration, black masculinity and cross­gender identification against a backdrop of small­ town parochialism. Mavis Dooley, the narrator, wakes up to find her son Nevil wearing dresses and make­up and claiming to be Jean Rhys. From this starting point, the novel becomes a comedy of errors, as Mavis, fear­ ing that her son has gone crazy, has taken too many drugs or has turned gay, tries to protect him from ridicule. She spins stories around town to

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prevent the local gossips from discovering Nev’s shameful secret, but she becomes increasingly aware that she is losing control of the lies she is telling. Through this narrative, the novel explores difference, and the fear and shame that often accompany it, in the context of small­town Aus­ tralia where anxieties about race, gender and sexuality intersect. This is the territory of Wayne King’s Black Hours, but fictionalised with humour. As the novel unfolds, Nevil reveals that Jean Rhys was a way for him to explore his literary creativity and the world of the feminine, so that he could write his novel with a central female protagonist. While Rhys is, for Nevil, a symbol of the outcast, Rhys’s work is also famous for its portrayal of cross­racial desire and identification, and Bitin’ Back works in an intertextual dialogue with Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Nevil’s favourite book. As he says of Rhys: She was ahead of her time; she wrote about society’s underdogs; about rejection and the madness of isolation. I know it sounds all crazy to you, Ma, but this is about who I am . . . a lot of people would never understand me, and they wouldn’t want to.What choices does a black­ fella have in this town except football?29 Ultimately, Bitin’ Back is about the courage to be oneself in the face of low expectations and narrow stereotypes.

Conclusion The extent to which Indigenous literature has the potential to trans­ form readers should not be underestimated. More and varied Indigenous writing continues to be published in Queensland, demonstrating the enormous contribution that Indigenous writers are making to the arts in this state. This body of work is producing new kinds of knowledges and new readers, and it deserves to be read on its merits as one of the most innovative and exciting forms of contemporary culture in Queensland.

Locating Queensland Children’s Literature: Reef, Bush and City Philip Neilsen Queensland has made a strong contribution to Australian children’s and young-adult literature, both in terms of the amount and quality of fiction written by authors from Queensland and as a geographic and mythical site in novels by Queensland and non-Queensland authors. This chapter does not attempt to provide an exhaustive, quasi-bibliographical survey of the field: readers and researchers everywhere in Australia, including Queensland, are well served by the comprehensive recent histories of Brenda Niall1 and Marcie Muir and Kerry White,2 and the older but still valuable work of Maurice Saxby.3 Rather, it presents a somewhat selective, but coherent, historical overview of the main thematic currents in Queensland children’s literature by exploring the representation of Queensland, and suggesting some common themes and developments. It is both illuminating and convenient to adopt a tripartite schema for this purpose, based on the three geographic sites with which, broadly speaking, the bulk of this writing has been associated: the reef, the bush and the city.

The reef As Gillian Whitlock puts it, regionalism can be considered ‘as a discourse, that is as a construction which tends to privilege certain values, particular concerns and, perhaps, objects’.4 Such discourse produces certain oppositions and identifiable characteristics. Queensland figures prominently

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in Australian children’s literature as an exotic, marginal, wilderness setting. Within that tradition, adventure tales located on the Great Barrier Reef and the adjacent North Queensland coast were for a long time the most numerous. Focusing on six significant examples of this shipwreck sub-genre, published between 1889 and 1969, it can be seen that they have two elements in common: first, a conscious literary debt to the Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Is land archetype (which Maurice Saxby5 has noted in Victorian and Edwardian fiction), and second, a representation of Queensland as the frontier or edge, where transformation and redemption, as well as primal violence and the monstrous, are possible. It is to be expected that novels from the 1890s to the First World War should serve the ideological function, as Robert Dixon puts it, of ‘resolving contradictions in the shared experience of imperialism, usually by inscribing the male reader in tales of regenerative violence on the colonial frontier’.6 This theme persists at least until the 1970s. Also, doubts persist well into the twentieth century about the dominant values of civilising imperialism and traditional masculinity, the ideologies of progress, science and commerce, and the moral benefits of artistic or bourgeois culture. Not surprisingly, adventure novels tend to reinforce the mainstream values and seek to dispel the doubts, though not without ambiguity and tension. In Blacks and Bushrangers: Adventures in Queensland (1889) by Edward B. Kennedy (who had been an officer in Queensland’s Native Police in the 1860s), twins Mat and Tim are forced to flee their home in the New Forest and they then catch a ship to Australia. The novel is peppered with references to Mat’s trusty copy of Robinson Crusoe, that icon of eighteenth-century Protestant individualism and the work ethic, which is given to him by Annie before he embarks. Wrecked on the Barrier Reef, the boys are received generously into an Aboriginal tribe where they remain for five years. The function of Crusoe’s Friday is served by Dromoora, the chief, who becomes their loyal protector. Mat’s elevation into Sydney society follows from a lecture at the School of Arts, and by the publication of his journal, which details the natural history and tribal customs of the ‘North’. The public of New South Wales is keen to hear of the ‘curious freaks of nature’ to be found in Queensland.

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Coincidentally, Mat meets Annie, who is now in Australia, and presses her to let him water her heavily symbolic tropical garden, surrounded by a ‘prickly hedge’ redolent of class as well as sexual boundaries. After reading to her from his journal, he is permitted to ‘penetrate through the little gate’ to the garden. Later Mat rescues Annie, with Dromoora’s help, from a murderous bushranger, and Annie reflects: ‘What a noble, manlike fellow he is!’ Back in North Queensland, searching for gold, Mat encounters his old tribe and is presented with a large clam shell. This is his treasure, because he can ‘carry the monster south’ to prove the authenticity of his journal. The giant clam motif recurs in many later novels, reinforcing the characterisation of Queensland as a primal place of dangerous and oversized predators.7 A lot of thematic work is done in this novel. Mat contributes to bourgeois scientific culture, while showing no sign of the notorious feminine vices (according to colonial–imperial ideology) of emotionalism or laziness. He uses his bush skills as a successfully trained hybrid of Aborigine and Englishman in order to track the bushranger and skilfully uses violence to counter violence regeneratively. In fact, Blacks and Bushrangers sets up a discourse within which the North Queensland landscape is depicted for another century. There are three main representations of Queensland capable of coexisting within the same narrative: a lush Garden of Eden; a topography remarkable because it is beyond description, either because of its vastness and variability or because, as a borderland, it is invisible, indefinable or in a state of becoming; or, less commonly, a universalised and non-specific terrain. The Isle of Palms (1915) by naturalist and journalist Charles Barrett (1879–1959) offers a later example of how the young hero can redeem himself and his dual Australian and British identity through violence, to which he resorts in order to counter an ultra-violent or rogue male. The plot of Barrett’s novel is uncomplicated: six comrades return to the Queensland reef island where one of them was once marooned and where he found a treasure map. The chums several times compare themselves self-consciously to Robinson Crusoe, and refer to Treasure Island. Though they are hunting buried treasure, there is an enormous emphasis on the scientific motivation of the group: most of them are self-taught

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‘naturalists’ and spend much time on the reef collecting and preserving specimens of undiscovered insects and other fauna – their dual aim is to find ‘treasure and rare birds’. Unlike Mat and Tim in Kennedy’s book, these youths are very conscious of the possibility of encountering ‘cannibal savages’, though they see none. The island is vividly described in Edenic terms, contrasting with the early part of the novel where the emphasis is on the generalised bareness, dust-storms, heat and flies of the Victorian outback. It is a very mannered Eden, the jungle conveniently containing ‘avenues’ of geometrically aligned trees, ‘delightful glades’ and ‘fairy beauty’, with hosts of multicoloured butterflies.8 To get to the buried treasure the youths have to dig a large channel and drain a huge lake. The symbolism of imperial progress is less than subtle: ‘“By Jove, Arthur,” said Jack, “… you’re a trump. Your scheme is worthy of the man who planned the Suez Canal”.’ But only Jack is loath to ‘spoil the beauty of the place’ by draining and flooding the site. He seems to represent a post-Romantic conservationism (conservation was a new idea in Europe at the time), framed as idealistic but naive.The first person narrator ‘laughs at Jack’s scruples’, explaining ‘I’m a rather practical fellow in some ways, and I couldn’t see the force [sic] of letting the preservation of a bit of scenery bar us from treasure’. The engineering project is dubbed ‘Treasure Canal’ and the Union Jack and the Australian flag are planted. Nature gives the canal its blessing: ‘We cheered when a small blue kingfisher alighted on one of the poles. It was a good omen.’ As in most reef novels through to the 1960s, Nature is seen as a resource.9 A group of rogue males sets out to steal the treasure as soon as the boys find it. The most contemptible aspect of these thugs is that they are lazy – laziness being the bête noire of the imperial adventurers, who, like Crusoe himself, are endlessly diligent and happiest when building things. As Jack says in disgust, ‘the whole gang, I should say, belong to the genus loafer’. Interestingly, the Victorian youths identify the shiftless gang of thugs as ‘Queenslanders’, displacing laziness and beachcombing on to the entire region. Certainly the southerners are more efficient at violence, as all adventurers must be, in order to overcome it. It is rifles and revolvers, well-aimed, which save the day.10 Unusually, Barrett does not include a Friday or a loyal Aboriginal character. In 1928, architect and adventure novelist Conrad H. Sayce

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(1888–1935) made a Friday-substitute the central focus of his novel The Splendid Savage. The twist is that this Friday was a white castaway as a child. There is a breathless description of the white hero’s first meeting with him: He was . . . of magnificent proportions. His only dress was a peculiar short skirt like two aprons of soft skin hanging in front and behind, leaving his powerful legs free play . . . his skin was . . . a beautiful deep brown . . . This wonderful specimen of manhood [had] a high intelligent forehead, big, piercing eyes set well apart, nose, lips, and chin denoting high breeding and great courage. This was no Australian blackfellow.11 The narrator quickly recovers his composure by remembering that he had been ‘the head of Public School athletics for two years’. They have a lingering handshake. Though he is their Chief, the splendid savage regards his tribe as inferior beings. Two decades later, the athleticism of the hero and racism of the narrative had not abated significantly. In 1948, two reef novels were published which illustrate how enduring and flexible the sub-genre was; a notable feature is the continuation of the scientific discourse. Castaways of the Monoboola12 by Tom Stanley Hepworth (1916–85), a director of the Australian Reading Research Foundation and author of a book on dyslexia, has a preface emphatic about its tale’s source in historical truth and scientific observation, though the main authority referred to is Daisy Bates, whose ‘account of Dowie, the insatiable blood drinker’ seems to be the primary inspiration for Hepworth’s obsession with cannibalism. Hepworth also refers to the wrecks of the Charles Eaton and the Stedcombe, and to the travails of Barbara Thompson and Eliza Fraser.The interweaving of fact and fiction lends legitimacy to the recycling of myths and prejudice. Two convict youths, Michael and Stephen, are on a ship to Moreton Bay when the crew mutinies and sails to North Queensland. They are shipwrecked on the reef and ‘stranded in the Australian loneliness’. Again, the North is characterised simultaneously as an abstract vastness and a tropical paradise. The boys’ principal fear is that they will encounter the

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sort of native who is ‘not averse to a chop or two of “man-meat”’, and, sure enough, the footprints they see in the sand (which they ‘puzzle over . . . in true Crusoe style’) turn out to be cannibals of the most committed kind, with mothers habitually eating their babies. As the narrator sums up waggishly, ‘They loved their friends in life, but they loved them even better after death’.13 In this context, the young English hero can discover his own propensity for violence. Challenged to mortal combat by a formidable warrior, Michael wins, not just because he is more skilled but because ‘an ungovernable fury seized him; he struck savagely upward with his knee’. This he follows with a head-butt. His masculinity is affirmed by this crude ‘savagery’, but also his evolution beyond the mere ‘cunning [of] primitive man’ is proved by the fact that he ‘disdains to strike a fallen opponent’. These Aborigines represent the feminine and unordered, natural other in opposition to the masculine, civilised heroes: the tribe is repeatedly seen as governed by ‘emotion’ and are ‘the children of nature’, incapable of living in ‘civilization’.14 The escaped convicts ultimately redeem themselves by rescuing a white woman, Barbara Thomson, from another tribe. Ironically, they are able to do this because of the skills they have learned in their two years with the Aborigines – a hybrid knowledge.The ‘natives’ have ‘tormented’ Mrs Thomson by feeding her scraps, forcing her to climb a tree to collect honey, pinching her on her sunburn, and, worst of all, making her ‘mind their children and blaming her if any of the children showed subsequent signs of ill-temper’.15 It is a timely rescue indeed. A more modern though equally laboured tale from 1948 is Barrier Reef Days by bushman, conservationist and communist William Hatfield (1892–1969), who was born Ernest Chapman. In Barrier Reef Days the North Queensland flora is luxuriant, but under the ocean lurk ‘ugly’, ‘villainous’ or ‘wicked’ ‘monsters’ and ‘brutes’. There is no overt imperial theme, except for proud references to Australia’s recent contribution to the war. The landscape is again perfect beyond reality – close to a parody of itself. There are ‘two silly wads of cotton wool stuck on Bartle Frere and Bellenden Ker, as no real clouds ever sit on proper mountains’. The seascape, however, offers a primal ‘nameless dread’. The dominant adult character, the ‘Scientist bloke’, provides endless pedantic explanations of

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natural phenomena, which are all too specific and named. Science triumphs over Nature, as the Scientist proves during the inevitable cyclone by using a diving bell successfully to make a film. As the Scientist points out, children need science to socialise and civilise them, so they can have an understanding superior to ‘raw savages like our aborigines’ – the ‘individual man in a state of Nature. The line between fact and fancy has to be established for children’.16 Armed with Gradgrindian awareness, the children certainly are not tainted with indolence – they work ceaselessly, collecting shells in order to buy an outboard motor. With keen commercial instincts, they exploit nature. And it is their shrewdly purchased outboard motor that enables them to conquer the ocean and initiate the rescue of sailors from a shipwreck. Another two decades on, in 1969, New South Wales writer Hesba Fay Brinsmead (1922–2003) confirmed the endurance and adaptability of the North Queensland shipwreck novel in Isle of the Sea Horse. She skilfully reconfigures the main elements: storm, castaways, tropical island, treasure, hidden map, shark, pirates, convicts and a heroic but violent young male. The pirates and convicts are evoked through documents the castaways conveniently find in a cave on their magic island; this ‘magic’ discourse differentiates the novel from previous, male-authored tales, as does a significantly different handling of the Nature versus modern science conflict. In this novel, despite the timely appearance of a ‘man-made’ lighthouse, the resolution is generally in Nature’s favour.The heroine, Emma, increasingly states her unease about her scientist father’s search of the reef for oil drilling sites, and passionately condemns the ‘scientists and zoologists and geneticians and natural historians’ eager to destroy this island ‘sanctuary’ where dugongs graze, dolphins ‘talk’ to her and, in a semi-fantasy motif, a little horse is ‘King’ or ‘thane’ of the island. The Indigenous people of the region have apparently long gone, though there are two gratuitous references to cannibalism.17 There is a heavily orchestrated multicultural theme in the novel. However, the most interesting aspect of this reworking of the boy’s adventure tale is that, through the wild horse, Brinsmead provides a substitute both for the Friday or loyal Aboriginal figure (Emma finds its hoof prints on the beach) and for the virile young male hero. The small white stallion is on one level a sublimated male lover, visiting her at night, looking

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through her window, ‘nuzzling her chest’ on the beach, being ‘Adam’ to her ‘Eve’, and evoking Sir Lancelot, unicorns and pony club heaven all in one. The horse continues the conventional function of a frontier male hero in being, paradoxically, chivalrous but skilfully violent. As Emma admiringly ‘murmurs’: ‘He’s a wild thane, when there is an enemy in his province . . . He’s gentle, but he’s a killer.’ Exploring an old pirate wreck, Emma is stranded by the incoming tide and a patrolling shark. Despite the novel’s Nature discourse, the poor shark is described, as in much earlier novels, in a morally judgmental way as ‘wicked’, a ‘monster’ and ‘evil’. It signifies the predatoriness lurking just out of sight beneath the treacherous ocean. The horse cleverly distracts the shark so that Emma can swim safely to the beach, but then gratuitously pounds the shark to a pulp with its hooves. Emma is totally approving of this act, which she perceives as a ‘fire’ in the horse.18 The treatment of landscape again emphasises an idealised, Edenic paradise, with the sole problem again being the serpent in the garden, which also is trampled by the horse, but only after it has bitten Emma. The depiction of North Queensland as indefinable also endures in this novel: the sea is ‘larger than life, larger than true’, while Proserpine is ‘at the edge of nothing, just before one comes to nowhere’. Perhaps partly because of this, the frontier – the boundary – remains enabling. The secret, unmapped island has a transformative power and regenerates all the castaways, including alcoholic, racist George.19 In the final three decades of the twentieth century, the reef sub-genre waned, along with the demonisation of sea creatures, perhaps in keeping with increasing environmentalism and the acceptance of the reef as an extension of beach and recreation.

The bush Similarly to other Australian children’s writers, Queensland writers have long drawn on popular discourses of the bush as a setting and a character referent, mainly for adventure stories and pioneering sagas. In the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, such books served a didactic function, imperialistic or religious, aimed at encouraging settlers to come to the state, especially from Great Britain. Most of the protagonists are adolescent boys, exemplary of the Coming Man

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type – plucky, athletic, tough, honest and anti-intellectual. They conquer the harsh environment, making it safe for women and productive for industry. Michael Costello’s Harold Effermere: A Story of the Queensland Bush (1897)20 has just such a hero. Harold is head of cricket and rugby at his Sydney school, though a dud academically. He has a city boy’s romantic notions of the bush, so his adoptive father determines to send him there, to dispel those illusions. Harold initially endures harsh conditions on a station back of Bourke. Here he meets Ponsonby, a jackaroo dandy who dashes about in a smoking cap and carpet slippers, spouting lines from Adam Lindsay Gordon. He is a figure of fun, representing both the new chum who has not fully adapted and the ‘Banjo’ Paterson school of bush idealisation. Harold runs away to ‘Central Queensland’, and undergoes a series of alternately riotous or sentimental mishaps and coincidental meetings with Ponsonby. He temporarily loses his innocence (especially because of character-sapping alcohol – a common temperance theme in these early novels), but is protected by his good heart. Ponsonby of course turns out to be his long-lost father.The novel is reminiscent of Fielding’s Tom Jones, including the gestures to classical gravitas by frequent quoting of the classics. Harold Effermere is realistic in its description of a dry, harsh bush that is not actively hostile or toxic; the ‘wild unbroken solitude’ is mainly a testing ground for Harold’s maturing. He becomes one with the outback – learning to eat bush tucker (‘iguana’) and expertly tracking – so as to rescue his beloved, Athne, but there is no rhapsodising about the landscape. Athne is promisingly of the New Woman type, but her thwarted longing for university is offset by domestic bliss and the satisfaction of educating Harold in the classics, in which she rigorously persists for years. Redeemed by both the bush and Athne – nature and culture – Harold the dunce develops into a successful grazier, Justice of the Peace and man of ‘refinement’ and ‘poetic taste’. The country reflects Harold’s solitary mood; it is the mournful domain of curlew and dingo. On his marriage day he does see ‘the beautiful and the sublime’, but only in the garden oasis around the homestead. The story suggests that the way to come to terms with a harsh environment is to turn to the arts and imagination. Harold and Athne go on bush rambles, oblivious to the eucalypts

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and absorbed in literary criticism: ‘In all these walks . . . they talked of prose and verse, of the latest books as well as the oldest, and displayed a masterly, critical analysis in their opinion of all.’ At one point Harold has a rival for Athne’s hand – a chap armed with a BA – but fortunately this rival has learned his classics only from ‘anthologies . . . not the most creditable’ and can’t really compete. Such sweet enlightenment does not extend to race relations. Like most children’s bush novels for decades to follow, Harold Effermere is un-selfconsciously racist. The loveable clown Ponsonby waggishly longs for the old days when ‘niggers’, like other natural pests, could be slain at will: ‘Ah! If only I were here in those days, with that old bayonet there, I’d sally out at midnight and cry “Havock!” and let slip the dogs of war . . . My motto would be – “Slay all,” as the poet said.’ As he spoke he seized the rusty bayonet and made some desperate thrusts at imaginary aborigines, calling out at the same time with convulsive fierceness: ‘Ha! die, villain! murderous reptile!’21 Queensland Cousins (1908), by English children’s author E. L. (Eleanor Luisa) Haverfield, one of the better known Queensland classics, is more hesitant than Harold Effermere about embracing Queensland ahead of England. Its child protagonists, the Cooktown twins Eustace and Nesta, are torn between the two cultures in a way that is unresolved, but they do offer resistance when they are forcibly taken back to England by their parents to be acculturated in a superior way of life. When the twins first see imposing Maze Court, the family stately home, they acknowledge that their own wooden house on stilts back in the canefields seems impermanent and vulnerable in comparison. But soon, ‘frozen’ out by their snobbish and rule-bound English cousins, they yearn terribly for the ‘freedom’ and space of Queensland: . . . Eustace and Nesta had grasped something of what coming to England really meant: . . . shut doors all round – there was no feeling of home about it. Rather, Eustace reflected bitterly, it was like a prison, and all the freedom of existence was gone.

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Queensland’s physical and social freedom, with children and adults interacting equally, is symbolised by the enabling, marginal space of the verandah: Life on the verandah always together, always in the thick of everything that was going on, with no shut doors anywhere, had ill-prepared them for this . . .22 Surprisingly, since the novel has to this point repeatedly condemned the blacks as a ‘fearfully low-grade lot’, full of hate for white men and sly as ‘snakes’, Eustace lulls himself to sleep by repeating the song the proQueensland cane farmer Bob had sung: ‘Certain for darkies dis is not de place, / Where eben de sun am ashamed to show his face.’ This identification by Eustace with the perspective of the ‘darkies’ occurs despite Bob’s and Eustace’s earlier capture and ill-treatment by the local tribe in Cooktown. Frontier-like, the novel is littered with instances of women and children sleeping with revolvers under their pillows and shooting freely at the shadows, dingoes and thieving stable boys who frequent the house at night. Though humidly enervating during the day, the frontier in the evening is thick with energy and menace. The novel ends in England with Bob destined to marry Miss Chase, an English–Australian hybrid, who finally reconciles the twins to their new home by personally ‘bewitching’ everyone. The struggle towards the Australianisation of children’s books, which began with Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894)23 is partly reflected even in Haverfield’s Anglophile tale. Other Queensland writers embraced gum trees over hedgerows whole-heartedly. Frances Campbell’s Two Queenslanders and Their Friends (1904), set near Warwick, was first published in the Westminster Gazette and is clearly aimed at an English readership. It takes up Harold Effermere’s advocacy of Queensland as a class-free society that facilitates both healthy intimacy with nature and a cultivated, educated life. Its child characters, like Haverfield’s twins, revel in the freedom of their rural life, but to a far greater extent. They hold no fear of the flora and fauna (they carry koalas and carpet snakes in their clothing, and are followed around by birds), and live in an idealised harmony with their bush utopia:

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Joe and Mimi were completely enfranchised. Like the wind they came and went as they listed, and no man knew when they returned or whence. Usually they arose with the dawn, and departed in the breathless cool of the evening . . .24 Yet seamlessly, at night, they and the jackaroos change into dress-jackets for dinner, maintaining the same civilised standards as Haverfield’s Cooktown family. Kay Glasson Taylor (who was born Katherine Glasson in Kywanna in 1893) wrote three novels of station life for young people, Ginger for Pluck (1929, under the pseudonym Daniel Hamline), Pick and the Duffers (1930) and Bim (1947). In Pick and the Duffers, eleven-year-old Pick (whose real name is Richard Leydon) and his Aboriginal friend Gordon use their detective skills to help to solve the mystery of cattle duffing on ‘Coomera’ and adjoining stations in South-West Queensland.25 Belinda McKay has argued that this novel engages with the assimilation debate through a plot arising out of the conflicted sense of identity of a number of mixed-race characters.26 Kay Glasson Taylor’s preoccupation with race continues in Bim. The heroine of this novel is twelve-year-old orphan Beatrice Iphigenia Merryweather (Bim), who lives with her guardian, Angus McNair, on ‘Mirrabooka’ in south-west Queensland. In an attempt to prevent her visiting English aunt, Frances Willingdon, from taking her back to England, Bim disguises herself as a black boy named Charlie and speaks pidgin with the complicity of Billy, the Aboriginal ‘King of Mirrabooka’. Although, as in Pick and the Duffers, some whites acknowledge the dispossession and attempted genocide of Aboriginal people, Bim strongly endorses the separation of the races. A series of comic misunderstandings created by Bim’s cross-cultural and crossdressing antics provide a mild and temporary disruption of race and gender norms, but when it is established that ‘Mirrabooka’ is free of miscegenation, Frances Willingdon is free to fall in love with Angus McNair. The danger of Bim’s removal from her Australian home is conveniently averted when Frances declares: ‘I couldn’t go and leave such a helpless, lovable pair to fend for themselves.You need a mother, Bim. And Angus needs a wife.There doesn’t seem to be anyone else who could undertake both jobs. So I’m going to stay.’27

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From Federation through to the 1950s, writing for children and adolescents steadily increased its enthusiasm regarding the benefits of growing up in the northern state. A fine example of such writing’s intended siren call to potential migrants is The Young Settler:The Story of a New Chum in Queensland (1927) by Methodist minister Joseph Bowes (1852–1928). Queensland is compared with ‘The Promised Land’ – it is ‘the new Garden of Eden’.28 Englishman Julian Grey, who fought in the First World War and later came to Australia as a stowaway – a ‘Boy’s Own’ sort of fellow if ever there was one – lives the pioneer-settler myth in the hinterland near Gympie and Nambour, driven by a desire to subdue the land (the ‘Stone-age savages’ no longer being a problem), guided by the Whitman motto ‘muscle and pluck forever’. This subtropical landscape is the archetypal mixture of abundance and disorder, and the author oscillates between a pioneer tale of taming the ‘wilderness’ and an older, Romantic lyricism. Ringbarking is a ‘tragedy’, but achieves a ‘bigger profit’. The resolution of this conflict is not always as banal or pragmatic. There is a charged scene in which Julian chops down trees with an erotic fervour: ‘There was something attractive in the very appearance of the axe. Its charm was like that of a comely lass.’29 His farm produce of strawberries and pawpaws blends in with the uncultivated fruits of the tropical ‘bush’. Pioneering Queensland demands a measure of pain, and Julian is rarely unbruised for long: he is chased by a ‘monster’ shark (on a sojourn to the coast), bitten by a brown snake, thrown from his horse, crushed by a falling tree, and all in a tract that aims to lure more new chums. In all, Bowes’s Queensland provides the perfect opportunity for the building of ‘character’, although this 1920s hero no longer has the predilection for scholarship and refinement of earlier protagonists. Book-learning in the between-wars period and the 1950s is mostly provided by school tales for girls, set in idyllic bush settings. Constance Mackness (1882–1973) was the founding headmistress of the Presbyterian Girls’ College at Warwick, which provided the setting for The Glad School (1929),30 the most popular of her ten novels about young people. ‘Queensland is a country of vast spaces’, containing ‘rosy gold and misty lavender’ hills, or plains ‘golden’ with grass or crops. The bush still offers dangers – swollen rivers, crumbling cliffs, snakes – but the girls

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are acclimatised and do not find them threatening. So relaxed are they with deadly brown snakes that they hunt them in the boarding house at night with torches. Cunningham’s Gap itself is a snakeless Eden, ‘carpeted with ferns’ and laden with orchids, lush violets two feet high and the air full with the song of birds and ‘gurgling of little streams’.This lush environment is grafted onto a standard English school tale of boarder’s frolics (the boarders represent an alternative ‘family’), and is repetitive in its language – all grins are ‘impish’, all eyes ‘twinkle’ – as well as precious in its descriptions of Wuzzie and Twinkle’s adventures. The girls call each other ‘old chap’ and fine one another a penny for using Australian slang like ‘bosker’.The main theme is the need to avoid ‘vindictiveness’, yet the tale contains anti-Semitic jokes and also mocks ‘black gins’. The charming novel Nellie Doran: A Story of Australian Home and School Life 31 was published in 1923 by ‘Miriam Agatha’, the pseudonym of Maryborough-born Agatha Le Breton (1886–1970). Nellie Doran constructs outback Queensland (well beyond coastal fecundity) as beyond the ordinary geography: its very first sentence tells us that ‘The Dorans’ selection was situated “outback” in Western Queensland, far, far away where the sun sets’. Morning in Queensland (1958)32 by Dalby-born Margaret Trist (1914–86) contains a more sophisticated psychological and social portrayal than others of its time, but also depicts outback Queensland as geographical absence; but in keeping with other novels of the North there is also a sense of vividness and abundance, even in corners of the dry West. Trist’s novel was appropriately republished (and re-titled Tansy) in 1991 by the University of Queensland Press as a Queensland classic. The Smiley novels by Moore Raymond (d. 1965), and their film versions, were extremely popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Raymond used details from his Queensland childhood to lend a sardonic, home-grown realism to his stories. As Sharyn Pearce has commented, Smiley’s characterisation looks back to the 1890s idealisation of the bush worker in the radical-nationalist Bulletin and also draws on Norman Lindsay’s Saturdee, C. J. Dennis’s The Moods of Ginger Mick and the comic-strip character Ginger Meggs.33 Smiley is a larrikin within a mateship paradigm that seems rather dated today. He is uncritically presented as more goodhearted and brave than the ‘sissie’ girls, who are smarmy and unreliable.

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His constant attraction to trouble and pranks is lauded as Australian male transgressive: ‘he’s dinkum!’ And there is a streak of sadism in the 1945 Smiley. Smiley and Blue find hilarious the pain and injury caused to ‘Jacky’, an Aboriginal boy, by a crayfish: ‘when at last the claw released its painful grip and the blood ran darkly down Jacky’s chin, the two boys were so convulsed that they had to squat on the ground to prevent themselves from falling over’. Later, when Jean is stung all over by red ants, the boys ‘laugh and leap with delight’.34 Still, to enumerate evidence of sexism and racism in children’s literature prior to the 1970s is only to restate the predictable along a well-worn critical path. The novel has significant strengths. It has a strain of understated social realism, less melodramatically addressed than in many contemporary young-adult novels. Adult dishonesty and lust are hinted at, and Smiley finally turns on his father for stealing his precious bicycle savings in order to buy more grog. Learning of the theft, and seeing his mother in tears, Smiley clubs his father with a cricket bat, and flees west into the bush. As in the nineteenth-century novels, the denouement is hastened by the inevitable snakebite and Smiley’s stoicism in the face of possible death. One of the relatively few Queensland novels set in western regions rather than near-coastal regions – in this case near the Warrego River – Smiley pulls no punches in describing the heat, the sand and the flies; these are accepted as the norm.Yet Queensland is still a place that avoids normal rules of space and time, and Smiley’s life is one of freedom, beneath a ‘gilded’ sky. One of the last popular writers of the Queensland bush adventure was Michael Noonan (1921–2000), and even he succumbed to the allure of the reef. Among his best-known works were his flying doctor books of the 1960s, and his 1962 Flying Doctor on the Great Barrier Reef strategically gives the reader both the saltbush and the coral.35 This makes possible a comparison of the two landscapes as Noonan presents them. The reef and ocean are far more detailed and vivid in description, and maintain the long tradition of using horror motifs to stress the monstrousness, abnormality and personified savagery of the reef environs. Stress is placed on the ‘unbelievably odd cow fish’ and the ‘hideous’ stonefish with its ‘two malevolent eyes . . . above a cruel mouth’, ‘predatory and vicious’ killer whales, and, of course, sharks and giant clams. Even the weather is

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monstrous: a cyclone is ‘like some sinister monster looming’. The reef is poisonous, but at least individualised. In contrast, the outback is abstract, generalised (the ‘arid heart of a primitive land’) and, without irrigation, ‘useless as desert’. The last page of the novel sums up Queensland as a place elusive and beyond definition: ‘suddenly . . . there’s an emergency operation got to be done in the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere.’ The attitudes are conservative even for the 1960s: the women defer to the men to make decisions, and the hero doctor ‘Jeremy’, who is Anglicised for an overseas readership, calls on his rowing and wrestling skills from university to get him through. The portrayal of Indigenous people is in keeping with an earlier era: they are ‘stone-age creatures’, ‘lowly living’ from roots and grubs, but with the ‘simple-minded’ ‘gentleness’ of children. The villain of the tale is a witchdoctor, and the central theme is the opposition between white science (machines, medicine) and black ‘primitive superstition’. From the late nineteenth century on, the Queensland bush was represented by various writers as an enabling space, in pointed contrast to the more urbanised southern states. One of the earliest fantasy novels for children, Australian Wonderland (1899) by ‘A.A.B. and Helumac’, begins in Victoria, Charlie the hero’s home.36 But swiftly, via the ‘QueenslandCrocodile-Express-Mail-Train’ – a line of crocodiles fastened jaw to tail – Charlie is transported north to undergo a series of Lewis Carroll– inspired adventures with talking animals and maths puzzles. Melbourne, and even Victoria, is too sober a location to convincingly situate a dimension where grotesquerie, surrealism and the flouting of the laws of physics are commonplace. By 1964, Hesba Brinsmead’s classic, Pastures of the Blue Crane,37 is explicit about the restorative effect of the Queensland bush on its heroine, as one critic has pointed out: Rhyl . . . raised in soulless boarding schools in soulless Melbourne . . . is affected to such an extent by the spirit of the Queensland property she has inherited that her understandable reticence . . . is replaced with an openness and an acceptance that transform her into a loving, caring, supportive young woman.38

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Max Fatchen’s Chase through the Night (1976) takes this a step further: the Queensland bush actively expels human evil.Three fugitive bank robbers (one from the ‘south’, so doubly questionable) try to hide in a distant country town, but the bush people, environment and animals – including a pet python and a dead crocodile – combine to confound them. As the gang leader reflects: ‘… it made you feel small, this country.You could hide in it, but you had to watch yourself because it could drown you, starve you, or dry you up and lose you like a grain of sand.’39 The remoteness and harshness of the state, once a challenge to settlers, is now a protection for the locals who have adapted to, and become part of, the landscape.

The city From the 1960s on, Queensland writers for children and especially for young adults increasingly moved away from plots centred on reef and bush, towards urban settings and the exploration of associated social problems. Of course, the interest in the natural environment persists in many novels whose central theme is environmentalism and the fragility of the Queensland pastoral. Examples are Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972),40 and Ian Ottley’s The Creeklanders (1991),41 a partial reworking of The Wind in the Willows into a rainforest milieu. And urban spaces and boundaries are still imbued with wilderness, as illustrated by Nigel and Caron Krauth’s daring and honest I Thought You Kissed with Your Lips (1990), set on the Gold Coast: Tall, palm-surrounded resorts lined the highway – The Sands, The Tropicana, The Miami Palace – they were huge, haunting towers of pastel-coloured concrete with artificial lights playing on them. The tangy, subtropical sea air (mixed with gusts of suntan lotion and traffic pollution) blew in through our open windows.42 Even the surreal, concrete monuments to America cannot block the tang of the ocean. There is a remarkably strong emphasis by Queensland novelists for adults on recreating their childhoods or adolescence (the list includes

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David Malouf, Jessica Anderson, Thea Astley, Janette Turner Hospital, Gerard Lee, Venero Armanno and Hugh Lunn). Whitlock has inferred from this phenomenon that ‘regionalism becomes not so much a place as an expression of alienation’.43 This is equally true of Queensland writing for children and young adults. The sense of the marginal is still present in the urban ‘problem novels’ – the dominant form of the 1980s and 1990s – where a child’s social situation is typically portrayed as on the edges of the culture, whether because of family dysfunction or racial and gender discrimination. Alienation is one of the themes central to the social problem novels that have flourished since the 1980s. There are a number of outstanding Queensland authors in this category, but Gary Crew has emerged in the last decade as perhaps the most critically acclaimed writer for young adults in Australia. His novels deal with the blurred boundaries between history and fiction and between realism and fantasy. He takes on major political and ethical themes, including racism and the attempted genocide of Indigenous Australians, patriarchal and fundamentalist religion and environmental degradation. Like David Malouf, he reinvents Australian history and mythology – a rare and ambitious enterprise for Australian children’s writers. His picture books, such as Lucy’s Bay (1992), The Watchtower (1994) and The Lost Diamonds of Killiecrankie (1995) are innovative and many-layered: these illustrated stories for young readers quickly set a new standard for sophistication and graphic design quality. Much of his work demonstrates the dynamic relationship that is possible between a writer and an editor (in Crew’s case, Helen Chamberlin) if that creative partnership has the chance to develop over a number of years and if the pressures of commercial marketing to publish books without risk can be sidestepped occasionally. The best of Crew’s novels have also found an adult audience. A fine example of this crossover appeal is Strange Objects (1991), the youngadult novel that has garnered an unprecedented number of awards, been reprinted twenty times and been successfully re-marketed, text unchanged, as an adult novel.44 Strange Objects uses as an historical base the Batavia wreck of 1629 when Dutch sailor Wouter Loos was put ashore in Western Australia. Influenced by post-colonial perspectives, the narrative resists conventional closure and a linear plot and

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advances by alternating between Loos’s journal and the present, and is further mediated by thirty-four ‘documents’ and statements. The characterisation is complex: the first-person narrator Stephen Messanger is sympathetically portrayed as isolated and alienated, but also revealed to be violent and racist. The problematic nature of history and the silencing of the Aboriginal voice are the central themes. As in the haunting Angel’s Gate (1993)45 and the powerful and under-praised No Such Country (1991),46 Crew combines social realism with the fantastic. Himself an avid childhood reader of R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island and the work of Ion Idriess, in Strange Objects Crew has continued the Queensland tradition of shipwreck tales, but relocated his treatment of the monstrous and the marooned to the opposite coast. James Moloney has also been a powerful voice on Aboriginal and other social issues. His novels, with their straightforward prose style and obvious sincerity, have won a string of national awards and a wide readership among younger teens. Dougy (1993)47 and Gracey (1994), set in a place very like Toowoomba, bravely attempt to imagine rural town life through the eyes of an Aboriginal girl and her brother. In Gracey the plot is driven by the mystery of uncovered bones and suggestions of past violence against the Indigenous people, but it is the commonsense insights of Gracey herself that give the story weight: I’d learned a lot about white people like Angela and one of the things that stands out is how afraid they are of appearing to be racially prejudiced – it only seems to affect city people. The locals around Cunningham couldn’t give a shit.48 Moloney’s work, as well as that of Brian Caswell and Sue Gough, has been supported by the University of Queensland Press’s emphasis on quality children’s literature that is accessible. Since publishing Merryl of the Stones in 199049 and winning the CBCA Book of the Year Award, Caswell has gained popularity for his sci-fi and speculative fiction. Sue Gough quickly achieved a profile with her first two young-adult novels, A Long Way to Tipperary (1992)50 and Wyrd (1993),51 combining the eccentric and exotic with careful historical background. Of the same generation, and one of the most prolific writers for both print and electronic

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media, David McRobbie ranges from Scottish folklore to contemporary humour in the Wayne series. More recently, Mark Svendsen and Karen Brooks have emerged as writers for young adults. Meanwhile, a further University of Queensland Press ‘discovery’, Louise Elliott, is also building a strong career as a writer. Her 1993 young-adult novel Dangerous Redheads deals ingeniously with the issue of poor decisions that can be made by the naive and romantic teenager.52 Without preaching, she uses the device of time-travel to promote ethical awareness. The narrator, Freya, is critically injured in a car accident, and while she hovers near death for three minutes she enters the minds and past lives of her mother and grandmother, covering decades. In this way, for example, Freya and her readers are able to ‘experience’ being duped by an older, married man. Prose fiction is not the only form that has been used to address children and young adults. The University of Queensland Press has been supportive of verse novels for both audiences in recent years. Perhaps the most successful exponent has been Stephen Herrick, who often mines his Brisbane childhood for material. Herrick deserves his national and international popularity: his free verse has an astonishing range of themes, from adolescent love to a mother’s death from cancer (unflinching and totally without sentimentality), to the examination of Australian social mores and taboos. His skill in this form is considerable; an occasional descent to stereotype as a shorthand is a minor blemish alongside the complexity of emotion he achieves in his characters’ reflections on friendship, prejudice and acceptance. His narrative verse is witty, inventive and humorous – a more difficult task than maintaining the ‘serious’, semi-melodramatic tone of so much children’s literature dealing with social problems. He achieved this even in his earliest work, such as Water Bombs (1995): Mum tells the check-out girl she doesn’t want plastic bags because we’re concerned about the environment. The check-out girl whispers to her boss ‘they should shoot the children then’.53

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Another award-winning verse novelist from Brisbane is Catherine Bateson. A Dangerous Girl (2000)54 focuses on relationships, sexual identity and thwarted feelings. Bateson understands and respects the painful selfabsorption and the mixture of confusion and sharp insight possessed by the young adult, and keeps a tight rein on her material with irony and a poet’s knack for the telling detail, image or subtle change of tone. Venero Armanno, one of Queensland’s leading novelists for adults, has successfully brought his lyricism and themes of yearning, memory and mystery to several young-adult tales, including The Ghost of Love Street (1997).55 Nick Earls has also continued to write for both cohorts, and his young-adult novels After January (1996)56 and 48 Shades of Brown (1999)57 have brought him immense popularity, with their trademark sharp wit, comic inventiveness and engagement with teenage romantic angst. Jenny Wagner and Jill Morris have both built strong reputations for their picture books. Morris’s commitment to a fact-based depiction of wildlife has been realised in a series of fine books. Wagner’s work is particularly succinct and handles sentiment completely without sentimentality – a rare quality in this genre. Tom Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat (1977) is a minor classic.58 Philip Neilsen diversified from adult poetry and fiction in the 1990s to write a comic junior novel, Emma and the Megahero (1995),59 in the tradition of Roald Dahl. Its strong environmental theme is taken up again in the dark and lyrical The Wombat King (1997).60 The Lie (1997) deals with class divisions, suburban myths and teenage love.61 The latter two titles have been translated into German and Korean, their symbolic resonance extending to other cultures. Neilsen collaborated with Gary Crew to cowrite Edward Britton (2000), a young-adult historical novel set in 1843 and carefully researched around the boy convict prison at Point Puer (across the bay from Port Arthur).62 The novel combines multiple levels of meaning with a more conventional adventure and romance tale. The thematic elements of the earliest Queensland novels – the monstrous, boundaries, Australian identity – are renewed along with an exploration of the themes of social justice, class, the social power of literacy, the subjugation of women, and the tension between science and the ‘natural’. Leading the younger writers is the internationally acclaimed Gothic horror novelist for adults, Kim Wilkins. The Gina Champion Mysteries,

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which began with Bloodlace (2001), revisit the ‘teen sleuth’ genre.63 Gina possesses the rare ability of psychometry, meaning that she can psychically read the histories of objects and their possessors. Each novel centres on a supernatural mystery and the hunt for an object that will aid in its solution. Predominantly told through first-person action and dialogue, the stories are fast-paced and entertaining. However, they are never without thematic complexity. Gina’s bright current of dry quips and teenage nonchalance is often punctuated by poignant reflections on the universality of human vulnerability, a lesson uniquely accessible to Gina through her psychic practice. The novels are ostensibly set in a seaside suburb an hour’s drive from Sydney, but the environs are actually based on the place where Wilkins grew up – Redcliffe, on Moreton Bay. So her tales combine the sea with elements of quest and mystery, in this sense reaching back to the earliest Queensland novels for children. Any conceptual scheme will tend to exclude certain individual writers, and perhaps even a minor genre. In this instance, the scheme of three main geographical settings for children’s literature has tended to exclude those writers whose settings are somewhere else altogether, perhaps not in the real world at all, or not entirely. The most famous Queensland writer of this sort is undoubtedly P. L. Travers (1899–1996), the author of the half-dozen or so ‘Mary Poppins’ books on which the blockbuster Disney movie of the 1960s was based. Born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, where she grew up, she left Australia in 1923 at the age of seventeen, never to return, and never having felt at home here. As she expressed it, ‘My body ran about in the southern sunlight but my inner world had subtler colours, the greys and snows of England where little Joe [sic] swept all the crossings and the numberless greens of Ireland.’64 Ruth Manley is another Queensland fantasy writer whose fiction makes no direct use of Queensland as a setting, in any of its geographical modes. Born in Barcaldine in 1919, Manley was a fine exponent of the fantasy genre. Her novel The Plum Rain Scroll (1978),65 for example, is a brilliant, mythological tale of heroic deeds and danger, set in Idzumo, the old Japan of folklore. In 1978 it was named CBCA Book of the Year. Richard ‘Skip’ Porteous (1896–1963), the acclaimed author of pastoral sagas and sea stories for adults, also wrote a trilogy for young readers, consisting of Tambai Island (1955), The Tambai Treasure (1958) and The

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Silent Isles (1963).66 Although the main character is an Australian boy, and Porteous’s treatment of adventure and manliness has much in common with his Queensland novels, the trilogy is set on an island near the Solomons.

Conclusion Writing for children and young adults has a rich and varied history in Queensland, as rich and varied as the landscape itself, an entity that has figured in most writing of this kind as more than merely a place in which adventures happen. Its presence is in many cases so vividly realised and so much a part of the action that it functions almost as an extra character in the story, as resourceful, perverse and unpredictable as any other. Perhaps for that very reason, the bridge between European and Indigenous writing, in much of which the landscape also plays an unusually active role, has seemed strongest and most genuine in this important area of Queensland’s literary production. Such connections augur well, not only for the future of writing for children in Queensland, but for Queensland writing more generally.

The Holiday-Maker’s Happy Hunting Ground: Travel Writing in Queensland Simon Ryan and Patrick Buckridge Travel, almost by definition, takes us away from home, and in doing so it can throw both terms in that simple definition – ‘home’ and ‘away’ – into cognitive confusion. Just as a newly distanced perspective on the place we came from can make that place look very different – more staid, more culturally deprived, or indeed safer and happier – so also the place or places we travel to can seem, on arrival, less strange and more familiar than we expected. (The Grand Canyon, it turns out, looks very much like a postcard of the Grand Canyon!) The ‘other’ that one meets when abroad is likely to have been thoroughly ‘textualised’ at home, formed by a web of expectations and stereotypes through which the foreign places and peoples are understood. Thus the strange is tamed: read through the lens of the expectation, its challenging strangeness may be already overwritten. Edward Said famously argued in Orientalism that the ‘East’ was so densely textualised by Orientalist experts and institutions that their construction became the effective reality, and consequently no traveller to the ‘East’ could interpret his or her experiences except from within that reality.1 Overseas travellers to Queensland, likewise, have usually already been exposed to images of endless beaches and dense rainforests in advertising, guidebooks and travel brochures; and interstate visitors can read Queensland through the discourses of northern peculiarity, as the home of redneck reactionaries and gun nuts, as well as crocodiles, dolphins and cane toads.

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Australia as a whole was subject to a similar textualisation in fantasies about a Great Southern Land in which dystopian or utopian societies inhabited a perverse, antipodean world. Early descriptions of Australia carry these images within them, and ideas of Australia as home to the odd, the weird and the eccentric largely derive from that collection of images inherited from Western Europe. Fortunately, this pre-textualisation of the ‘other’ land to which one travels does not entirely preclude the unexpected; the land, its sights and its inhabitants are not always smoothly integrated into a system of knowledge. Consider the explorer Charles McDouall Stuart meeting an Aborigine in the desert, who responded to the sight of the white explorer with what Stuart believed to be a Masonic sign of greeting. Stuart recognises, or thinks he recognises, the sign, but does not really know what to make of it.2 Travellers in Queensland do not always experience such puzzling interchanges, yet their experiences are often unanticipated, uncomfortable and unexpectedly moving. The novel and inexplicable things that happen to authors provide much of the variety of Queensland travel writing, but its breadth as a form also results, in part, from the diversity of the writers themselves and of the genres in which they write. Influenced as travel authors may be by the ideas they bring to Queensland, they are widely differentiated by gender, national and class differences; they travel for a variety of purposes, and they record their travels in differing ways. Thus a travel writer may be travelling for commercial reasons, as was Nehemiah Bartley, whose Opals and Agates is remarked on below; or he may be propagandising, which was the purpose of the anti-Chinese campaigner John Potts. Ellis Rowan (1848–1922) recorded her botanical travels, and her colourful articles and flower paintings were widely published in the early 1900s in magazines such as New Idea in Melbourne and (posthumously) The Muses’ Magazine in Brisbane. Other writers found small presses for travel tales and reminiscences, or kept their diaries and letters private, while others such as Frank Clune, Jack McLaren and Ion Idriess established reputations for travel and adventure tales. The main focus of this chapter is on the years 1860 to 1950, as this period captures the last stages of land exploration and the dawn of the new age of mass tourism. These years were arguably the golden

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age of travel writing about Queensland, an age when a non-Aboriginal Queenslander, someone from another colony or state, or a ‘new chum’ could find a publisher for travel memoirs. What differentiates the period 1860–1950 from the periods before and after is that travel was no longer the inherently serious practice of ‘exploration’, with all the governmental and colonial significance implied. But nor was it ‘merely’ travel for pleasure, or at least it was not often presented that way. A serious pretext for travel was needed; either the health of the author, commercial necessity or the desire to supply the reader with educational material or a life story were produced as reasons to supply the memoir, travel diary or propaganda text. But as individual authors paraded their seriousness, the wonderfully named Intelligence and Tourist Bureau of the state government began laying the groundwork for the mass tourism that emerged after t he S econd World War.3 This chapter considers several representative examples of Queensland travel writing in terms of three different dimensions, which most if not all travel writing offers to the reader in varying degrees. The first dimension is ‘meeting others’: travel writing features encounters with racial or cultural ‘others’, the dynamics of which can range from hostility and incomprehension to significant levels of empathy. The second dimension is ‘embodiment’: travel is an embodied activity, and writing itself is the result of a physical act; so the various physical travails recorded by the authors writing about Queensland are noted. The third dimension is landscape, and a brief account is presented of how the seemingly limitless expanses of Queensland have been encapsulated in prose.

Meeting ‘others’ In 1864 Frank and Alexander Jardine were contracted by the Queensland government to supply the settlement of Somerset on Cape York with cattle. A subsequent collection of their journal writing was compiled and edited from their logbooks by Frederick J. Byerley, the ‘Engineer of Roads, Northern Division of Queensland’. The typical preface to an exploration journal is the place where the author–explorer can praise the support of patrons and decry any suggestions that the merits of the work might be more literary than scientific. An editorial preface, on the other hand, is usually an opportunity to defend the reputation of the explorers

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and in ancillary arguments urge that further efforts be made to ‘civilise’ the areas the explorers have discovered. Byerley’s preface is not only exemplary in this regard but is significant in its presentation of the two brothers. Comparing them to previous travellers in the area, in particular the foreigner Leichhardt, he presents the Jardine boys as exemplars of the new Australian, at home in and acclimatised to the tropical bush. The perspicacity usually attributed to Aboriginal people is projected onto their supposed successors: . . . the Brothers, although not scientific naturalists, were keen sportsmen, excelling in all exercises requiring strength and activity, who had acquired from their training in the bush that sharpening of the senses and faculty of observing, the peculiar result of a life in the wilds . . .4 This special sharpness of vision allows the Jardines to overcome any lack of scientific training, the preface argues, and valuable zoological and botanical observations are to be found in the journal. In an unpleasant irony, it is the bodily vigour and clarity of eye possessed by the new Queenslander that allows him to track the depredations of the old Queenslander – the Aborigine.The preface positions the Aboriginal people in a way that was typical of the period: . . . running through the whole journey, was the incessant and determined, although unprovoked, hostility of the natives, which, but for the unceasing vigilance and prompt and daring action of the Brothers, might have eventually compassed the annihilation of the whole party. Had Leichhardt used the same vigilance and decision the life of poor Gilbert would not have been sacrificed, and in all probability we should not now deplore his own loss. But the black tribes which dogged the steps of each expedition, and amongst whom, probably, were the slayers of Kennedy and Gilbert, met at the hands of the Brothers the treatment they deserved. If the lessons were severe, they were in every case of the native’s own seeking, and were administered in fair and open combat, in which very few of the white party were without having narrow escapes to record.5

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The assumption that the particular Aborigines who had killed Gilbert (in 1845) and Kennedy (in 1848) were now interested in doing away with the plucky Jardine brothers nearly twenty years later seems implausible at best. What is of more interest is how insistently and repetitiously the point about the fairness of the killings is driven home, and how laconic, by contrast, is their companion Richardson’s reporting of killings (his journal was appended to those of the Jardines in a composite 1998 edition). The major conflict of the Jardine journey came on 18 December 1864 when the party shot dead at least thirty Aborigines by their own count, which is again presented as an act of necessity. Richardson’s journal simply records for this day: ‘Many of them lost the numbers of their mess, but none of our party were hit.’6 The killing of Aborigines, not an infrequent event in Queensland, had, in a published travel journal, to be justified by the construction of the implacably hostile native, and to be written within the conventions of the heroic exploration adventure.The Jardine journal obeys these conventions: violent conflicts are presented in terms of the reluctant use of superior weapons wielded by determined yet ultimately merciful whites against the cunning and treacherous indigenes. Postcolonial theory suggests that the textual construction of the ‘other’ usually involved a projection onto the other of those elements of one’s supposed civilised self that most need to be repressed. The narrator’s description of another conflict the party had with an Aboriginal group is instructive in this regard: ‘Frank Jardine here owns to a feeling of savage delight at the prospect of having a “shine” with these wretched savages.’7 Any travel writing that attempts to describe the ‘other’ often produces such a slippage: the ‘savage’ Frank Jardine occupies an indefinite position rather than a pole in the savage / civilised binary. If travel writing records deadly meetings between people, it also recalls curious campaigns against the very existence of the ‘other’. John Potts’s One Year of Anti-Chinese Work in Queensland (1888) records his travel for propagandist purposes. Little more than a collection of stereotypes, denigrating the spread of ‘Mongolian’ influences through the land, Potts’s defence of an imaginary White Australia would be full of bitter irony for an Aboriginal reader. The journey from Cairns to Herberton, Potts intones, ‘speaks volumes of painful facts to the intelligent observer as he

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notes the alarming number of stalwart Chinese invading the land of his fathers’.8 Potts’s writings show how far travel can be from the simple dynamic of moving from home to ‘elsewhere’. Instead, his travels reveal that ‘elsewhere’ – the spatial ‘other’ – is already at home, and Potts finds himself travelling in an attempt to rebuild the barrier between home and elsewhere, rather than to traverse it. For the southern traveller North Queensland did indeed represent the border between a British Australia and a decadent East. The anonymous ‘Up North’: A Woman’s Journey through Tropical Queensland (1912) finds that in the contemplation of Thursday Island ‘all joy is killed when one reflects how unpleasantly near it is to the East’.9 Later travel writing is still decidedly ambivalent about the Asian presence in North Queensland. A most remarkable example of this is found in another anonymous text, The Wonderland of the North: Scenic Beauties of North Queensland, Australia’s Winter Tour of Tours, published in 1922 by the Queensland state government’s Intelligence and Tourist Bureau. Obviously written before public relations became the highly scientific discipline it is today, The Wonderland of the North includes a day in Cairns: We went to the clean and charming Japanese curio shop, and worried the altogether polite Japanese attendants . . . At Chinatown, which lies within the precincts of Cairns, is a medley of Eastern sights and Eastern picturesqueness. The squalidness of the squat houses is often relieved by a tiny Chinese youngster in loose, long trousers of red and green. There are babies with faces like shining porcelain, and black-haired women with eyes like brown slits of light. They make one forget all the misery and disease that may be lurking in such places.10 The Cairns Chinatown was subsequently destroyed in an act of urban renewal. Ironically, the Chinese temple and archaeological site at nearby Atherton now functions as a tourist attraction. Met with hostility from miners, and later with cautious enthusiasm from tourist authorities for providing some safe exotica, Chinese and other Asian Australians feature in only a few travel records. The most frequently recorded encounter with cultural difference in twentiethcentury travel writing was in the meeting of Aborigines and European

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Australian travellers. Most travellers into the 1920s and 1930s were still labouring under the illusion that the Aborigines were a dying race.11 Writing in the 1920s, W. Lavallin Puxley, a ‘new chum’ in Australia and a subscriber to the ‘dying race’ theory, engages in a kind of aestheticisation of the prospect of Aboriginal extinction that is a continuation of a nineteenth-century tradition, to be found in the journals of the explorer Ernest Giles.12 Describing a mission church service, Puxley writes: I could not help thinking that there was a parallel between the decaying race and the dying day, for the little windows were open and I could see outside the silver and gold sunset behind the gum-trees; and I wondered if we too should one day pass away, as these were doing, before some newer development of the human race, leaving only a few traces of our sojourn here as they had done. And then the service came to an end and we walked home in the dying light, with the beautiful Australian haze lending its magic to bush all around us.13 But for other travellers, especially those from southern states, Queensland offered a rebuttal of dying-race theories. For travellers such as G. E.Terry, who wrote a series of articles for the Farmer’s Weekly (Cohuna, Victoria) – later collected as Unknown North Queensland (1932) – Palm Island’s ‘vast swarm’ of Aboriginal children disproved the theory decisively. Terry notes caustically that people in the South ‘speak with affected sadness of the aborigines [sic] as a fast vanishing race’, and after witnessing a Palm Island corroboree also opines that justice ‘has never been done to the artistic instincts and capabilities of the Australian aborigine’.14 Terry is also an advocate of the ‘inter-racial’ marriages of British and Italian partners that he finds are common in North Queensland, approving on the grounds that the resultant female offspring do not go ‘seedy’ by thirtyfive or forty.15 It can be concluded that much writing about the ‘other’ by white Australians travelling through Queensland is involved in the policing of boundaries, always a site of anxiety. The anxiety may be heightened in Queensland because of the strength of Aboriginal culture and the presence of Asians, and because of the nearness of the ‘East’. For many generations of southern travellers, Queensland is often perceived as a

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weakness in the barricades of racial purity, a place where the ‘other’ is disturbingly at home. But like all boundary riding a number of paradoxes emerge that must be negotiated: Chinatown is picturesque but diseased, the northern triumph of British civilisation can only be maintained through marriage with Italian stock, and the prosperous and hardworking Chinese threaten ‘ancestral’ lands that were still in the process of being wrenched from Aboriginal hands. The beauty of travel writing is that these paradoxes never have to be considered in a detailed way.The author and the focus of the text move on, leaving one more impression.

The travelling body While travelling provided an opportunity to face the cultural or racial ‘other’, it also meant a confrontation with the self, and specifically with one’s own body. The most common means of mass travel before the advent of the car were ship, coach and train, and each made different demands on the constitution of the traveller. The close proximity necessitated by group travel violates so many social codes governing the body and body space that awkwardness cannot be avoided. Nehemiah Bartley recognised one of the hazards of travelling – eating dubious foods – in his Opals and Agates; or Scenes under the Southern Cross (1892). A commercial traveller moving through the Southern Downs, he recalls the intense and prolonged heat of a Darling Downs December and how, unwisely, he and a party of guests accepted a meal of tinned lobster – with predictable consequences. The Diary of a Three Months’ Trip to the Outlying Districts of the North-West of Queensland (1887), by ‘A Commercial Traveller’, records a coach on its way to Hughenden taking on two unaccompanied women, much to the disgust of the coach driver. The bodily discomfort at the close proximity of the coach companions makes itself evident to one of the women: ‘one of our passengers, a governess, was really surprised and not a little unnerved at the peculiar pell-mell manner in which we were repeatedly jostled together; it was certainly not in conformity with drawing room etiquette’.16 These breaches of propriety are only worsened by the constant need to alight and walk through thick black mud as the coach makes its way uphill. William Senior’s Near and Far: An Angler’s Sketches of Home Sport and Colonial Life (1888) describes a Cobb & Co coach

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journey to Roma, during which he was fortunate enough to travel in the box-seat above the imprisoned passengers: To me fifteen hours on the confined box-seat, travelling over rough country robbed of every vestige of life, with a hard upright wooden wall to pound the shoulders into jelly, and reaches of track upon which the coach imitated the pitching and rolling of a ship, could only be satisfactory as extreme penance . . .Yet the poor ‘insides’ were worse placed. On the box we were at least elevated above the worst of the dust. At the end of the first stage the people within were thickly coated with sand, and venerable with soil powder. They were packed in like sardines, and, when the jolting was extra severe, we, from our outer perch could hear such groans of abject despair that, in our vile selfishness, we would laugh until tears guttered channels down our grimy cheeks.17 Travel by coach could be dangerous as well as uncomfortable. Arthur Bicknell’s Travel and Adventure in Northern Queensland (1895) recalls a coach trip that ends in disaster as the coach plummets off a cliff, impaling two of the horses on trees. It also records an episode that might have been emblematic of white Australians’ attitude towards the Chinese. The driver of Bicknell’s coach refuses to take on a Chinese passenger: In the afternoon we met a Chinaman; he had his bundle under his arm, probably containing all his worldly possessions. He was completely done up, and hailed our driver to stop; but Joe declined to have anything to do with him, and would not give him a lift . . . [he] said he declined to carry Chinamen at any price.18 The coach seemingly passes by the traveller, but some five miles down the road he is found to have hitched a lift on the back of the coach and is ejected by the driver. Travellers were also subject to the rough and ready forms of medical treatment available. Emmeline Leslie records a spectacular cure afforded to a traveller:

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[who] was brought to my husband with a finger bitten by a death adder. Without a moment’s hesitation he picked up his powder flask from the table near and blew up the finger . . . saved the man’s life, who coolly remarked, ‘Thank you, sir; it’s a pity it’s that finger, for I am a shoemaker by trade’.19 Bodily dismemberment may have been one of the more unexpected risks the traveller faced, but there were also positive bodily experiences. Travellers recall the sense of bodily strength experienced through travel and the freshness and novelty it brought. Some came from southern states for their health, particularly those with respiratory diseases. Of these, many travelled to Toowoomba or Kuranda, as their elevation was widely held to give the air a rejuvenating power. Although high adventure may form much of the subject matter of the nineteenth-century travel tale, the travelling itself is usually presented as having a serious purpose. Travelling is for commercial reasons, for transporting goods, for discovering exploitable land, or for learning more about the botanical or mineralogical resources of the colony. As these occupations were reserved in a strongly patriarchal society for men, the opportunities for women to write travel narratives were few; to have them published was even more unusual. An exception was Ellis Rowan, an accomplished botanical illustrator who travelled through Queensland on several occasions in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. From a wealthy Victorian family and educated in Britain, Rowan was a shrewd business-person and self-promoter. She wrote of her adventures in the New Idea, and in 1898 she published A Flower Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, which is a compaction of several trips she made to Queensland. If the choice of the phrase ‘flower hunter’ rather than ‘botanist’ lends an acceptably conventional air of feminine dilettantism to her account, the vigour with which she pursued specimens was deeply unconventional. One memorable episode sees her travelling on the Cairns to Kuranda train, then as now a North Queensland scenic highlight. Supposedly travelling on the cow-catcher of the train, she experiences a succession of intense bodily impressions somewhat at odds with a traditional femininity:

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Such a quick flight through mid-air in this position, holding on like grim death with heels and hands, brings rather too great a sense of exultation, your heart seems to fill your throat, your blood tears through your veins, and the speed through the air sounds in your ears like the whizz of a hundred spinning-wheels, while everything beside you runs into a watered ribbon of jumbled colours.20 Her New Idea version of the story has her travelling in the reverse direction, and there are other elements as well that seem to cast doubt on its literal authenticity,21 but whatever the truth, the passage displays Rowan’s interest in positioning herself as a ‘New Woman’ type of adventurer. This is always moderated in such a way that conventional femininity is not abandoned; rather, it is controlled. In one episode, for example, she is trapped by a rising river and is ultimately rescued by a party of Aborigines: ‘Just for an instant something rose in my throat, but I quickly pulled myself together again.’22 Queensland travel writing diverges from many other related discourses that suggested that the tropics were not a place for white men or women. Although the oppressions of heat, dust and impenetrable jungle are written of frequently, the revivifying air, the warmth of the waters and the invigorating smell of tropical flowers are just as frequently celebrated. Despite the privations the body may suffer in the act of travelling, a general impression remains that the Queensland climate will ameliorate ills and rejuvenate the body in a way that other climates cannot.

Landscape description What distinguishes popular travel from exploring is that the means of transport govern the ability to see and describe the passing landscape. Whereas a maritime explorer may, wind permitting, anchor his ship in order to chart a harbour, the paying passenger is carried onwards with no reference to his or her will or preference. Thus the celebrated travel writer Frank Clune in Free and Easy Land (1938) describes his dissatisfaction with that archetypal tourist experience, the Cairns–Kuranda railway:

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Train stops one minute. To think I came 1500 miles through fifteen tunnels and worked thirty hours overtime to have a one-minute view of a thousand-foot waterfall. Terrible!23 Whether the experience proves to be satisfying or, as in Clune’s case, frustrating, the Cairns–Kuranda railway stands out as a key moment in most of the travel diaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that deal in any way with North Queensland. The railway represents a nascent civilisation come to tame the wilderness, yet paradoxically it is this very wilderness that strikes the traveller with awe. And, of course, in that familiar touristic irony it is only by means of the railway that the common traveller could ever see it. In a description of Tully and its surroundings, for example, the anonymous 1926 Beautiful Queensland (cover title: Beautiful Queensland from a Railway Carriage Window) reproduces the usual triumphant narrative of progress: The cane farms beyond Tully are interspersed with glorious scrub scenery. Palisades of tall feathery palms surround the clearings, and enclose dense jungle wherein Nature has displayed her grandeur in a riot of tropical growth . . . Ten years ago the primeval forest held undisputed possession of the country through which we are now travelling. It was a trackless jungle matted with lawyer vines and impossible undergrowth where the stinging tree flourished spitefully . . . Today the fertile field spreads her green mantle across the smiling valleys and the solitude of ages is broken by the laughter of the happy children.24 The bush that was destroyed was an evil place of stinging trees and obstructive undergrowth, but it is the same uncleared vegetation where nature most fully displays her grandeur. Such discontinuities are a standard feature of settler-society cultures, but Beautiful Queensland takes the paradox a step further with its description of the Cairns–Kuranda railway, this time illustrating its dangers: Still climbing over abysmal gorges, along spidery bridges, through tunnels and cuttings, out upon narrow ledges where sheer drops of hundreds of feet hold our fascinated gaze, we presently reach Stony Creek.25

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In descriptions such as these, the railway becomes a symbol of progress, but such an insubstantial production next to the ‘abysmal’ spaces of nature that the completeness of civilisation, indeed its very possibility in the North, is brought into question. In other writings about the popular Cairns to Kuranda day trip, however, the apparently happy collusion of nature and art is emphasised. One of the sights is the Kamerunga state nursery, where, according to L. L. Wirt’s much-reproduced essay ‘Nature’s Australian Masterpiece’, ‘the utilitarian is the main feature, [yet] the aesthetic is not lost sight of, for there is a magnificent plantation of ornamental foliage plants that is worth travelling a thousand miles to see’.26 Once at Kuranda, the traveller, from the First World War onwards, had the opportunity to see Frederick Parkhurst Dodd’s insect collection, where nature was pinned, framed and arranged in artistic patterns for the edification of the public. Forced into displaying his collection to the public because of the collapse of the European collectors’ market with the advent of the war, Dodd theatrically displayed each case by slowly rotating it until the sunlight reflected off the insects into the eyes of the awed tourist.27 The bedazzled day-tripper could then retire to the Fairyland Tea Gardens, where once again nature and utility were married: A coo-ee brings a boatman across to convey visitors to the natural scrub gardens and arboreal grandeur, amidst which tea is served at rustic tables by a deft little handmaiden – a veritable but dextrously graceful child of the wood. The chairs and tables used in the gardens are artistically fashioned of scrub timbers.28 When travellers are allowed off the train or out of the coach, they have time to develop a more traditional static response to the landscape, rather than the kinetic one that a moving vehicle provides. One of the common nineteenth-century ways of making sense of the land was to incorporate it into the pre-existing schema of the ‘picturesque’. Theorised in a variety of ways by such aesthetes as Humphry Repton and William Gilpin, the core of the picturesque was the suggestion that views of nature fall, inadvertently or by design, into a composition similar to a painting. The picturesque had such a strong presence

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in nineteenth-century travel writing that it became difficult to look at any attractive view without consciously evaluating its composition. The following description of a ‘jungle’ scene by Ellis Rowan illustrates the concern with delineating foreground and background, establishing the light and atmospherics and, in a final irony, showing how the pictorial construction of the scene can inhibit any actual attempt to paint it: It was a very picturesque scene; the rich, dark brown of the natives and their huts, the reds of the dying fires and films of blue smoke as they curled upwards against the dark background of forest jungle, and in the foreground the sheen of sunlight on the river, where the lithe figure of a native boy was dextrously paddling a little canoe on the opposite side, all combined to form a picture. Wild beautiful nature shut me in on every side. How could I caricature her? In utter despair I shut up my sketchbook.29 A. T. Nixon’s Travel in the Tropics (1941) mobilises the aesthetic of the picturesque in responding to a long-lasting tourist destination, possibly second only to the Cairns–Kuranda railway – the Mount Morgan mine: The Mount Morgan mining area is a sight which would gratify the gods. The country may be poor, but it is picturesque. The mountainous mounds of clay and soil of all colours of the rainbow which have been dug from the depths of the earth and piled among the valleys and up the mountain sides are certainly artistic and spectacular.30 This illustrates the malleability of the picturesque as an aesthetic category, and, again, the ‘aestheticisation’ of signs of civilisation such as farms and mines. The process is taken a step further when travel writing is integrated with vignettes of European Australian history, a more frequent tendency in the 1930s and 1940s than in more recent times. Frank Clune’s first stops in Queensland are the Oxley Library and the Oxley monument. His description of flying over Toowoomba, in Free and Easy Land, includes a sighting of the Essex Evans memorial in Webb Park: the landscape for the traveller is now inscribed with cultural as well as agricultural or engineering signs.

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Some of the most significant travel writing of the 1940s and early 1950s is to be found in three works by the communist writer Jean Devanny: By Tropic Sea and Jungle: Adventures in North Queensland (1944), Bird of Paradise (1945) and Travels in North Queensland (1951).The last of these, it is true, has an illustration facing the title page of a ‘Saltwater aborigine’, but in other respects Devanny is well ahead of her time in her attitudes to the Indigenous people. Travels in North Queensland portrays the difficult and often brutal conditions of life in the tropics. The book covers such topics as the forcing of Aboriginal women into virtual sex slavery, and it contains a critique of the paternalism and authoritarian attitudes of some missionaries. Devanny delights in the untouched beauty of the Barrier Reef islands, but also finds that the less obviously attractive scenery of industrial Mount Isa has charming possibilities. At night: [t]he works stretched along the side of a central hill, facing down on Mt Isa. Every part of them was lit up by electricity, but in addition and infinitely lovely was the pulsating red-rose glow from the furnaces, the green, terracotta and yellow of the slag. Clouds of multi-coloured ‘smoke’ rose from the rivulets of slag. The sight was grand and rare.31 Devanny’s strangely beautiful and sensuous description of a heavyindustrial landscape may reflect the influence of Soviet-style proletarian realism; and similar, if less intense, descriptive passages can be found in the fiction of her more famous comrade in literary arms, Katharine Susannah Prichard. But the style also functions as a kind of ‘propaganda’ for greater industrial development in North Queensland – a theme that emerges constantly in her interviews with workers and their families in her travel books. Her depictions of the North as an under-developed world where harsh colonial attitudes still for the most part prevail is in stark contrast to the emerging image of the North as a tropical playground for tourists. Indeed, the last of the three books, Travels in North Queensland, had some elements removed at the galley stage for fear of libel action, and one reviewer believed that it probably discouraged people from travelling north.32 Her intentions, however, were certainly to encourage economic development and to attract a larger population of working families to North Queensland, and also to encourage

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tourists to the region to look outside the well-travelled pathways and images of the tropical idyll. More politically mainstream travel writers at the time were pursuing similar objectives. In 1950–51, John K. Ewers, the Western Australian writer and critic, in company with the bushman and raconteur Bill Harney, conducted a two-year survey, mainly across the north of Australia from Wyndham to Cairns, and south to Alice Springs and Peak Downs near the central Queensland coast. The venture was commissioned by the editor of the magazine Walkabout, the official organ of the Australian Geographical Society, and the resulting book, With the Sun on My Back (1953), went through three editions in the next ten years. The book is a richly anecdotal and fact-filled report on economic and social ‘progress’ in the northern and inland parts of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland, and though it bristles with personal encounters and stories on nearly every page, Ewers’s ultimate aim is to make a comparative assessment of such large and weighty matters as mining, fishing, farming and grazing, public infrastructure, community development, and the condition of the Aboriginal people, right across the top half of the continent. His main conclusion – that Queensland’s prosperity, vigour and pace of development, fuelled largely by the thriving commerce of the coastal towns, put it streets ahead of Western Australia and the Territory – echoes down the decades, for better or worse.33 Ewers’s own strong suit as a writer is the social anecdote. For quietly striking natural descriptions he sometimes enlists the help of a friend, the novelist Eleanor Dark, like him a regular contributor to Walkabout, where she had once described the Barkly Tableland between Tennant Creek and Camooweal as ‘just the face of the earth going on and on’. Dark was also the author of one of the finest evocations of the Glasshouse Mountains, as seen from the heights near Maleny: . . . the first impression on the mind is less one of admiration than of an astonishment which borders upon incredulity. It is noticeable that sightseers do not so much look at them as watch them, with an almost suspicious attention. There they undoubtedly are – but were they there ten minutes ago? And will they be there if one glances away for a moment, and then, quickly, back again? Beautiful they certainly

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look, but more than anything else, they look improbable. They make no compromise with the plain on which they stand; no foothills lead up to them. The earth is flat, and then, suddenly, it is perpendicular.34 This kind of complex aesthetic response is especially characteristic of landscape description, a mode of writing that overlaps substantially with travel writing, and has its own rich history, especially in North Queensland, as Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins show in Part 4 of this book. Such writing mutates rather more easily than does travel writing proper into tourist guide literature, where the formulas of sun, surf ’n’ sand, of beauty one day and perfection the next, have reigned supreme for half a century; and where the ‘journey’ – whether in Clem Christesen’s Queensland Journey (1937), George Farwell’s Sun Country (1970), or the dozens of brightly coloured coffee table books that have appeared since – is experienced, if at all, by the reader and potential tourist, not the author, and usually at a later date. The years since 1950 have nonetheless produced several travel books of some literary quality, books in which – as in all good travel writing – the writer offers himself or herself to the reader as a thinking, experiencing subject, responding to and engaging with the people and places encountered in complex and interesting ways. One of the best, and certainly the best-known, such book in recent decades is Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980), in which, however, Queensland can claim only a small share, based on the author’s birth on a Queensland cattle station and a science degree from the University of Queensland.35 The book itself is the story of her solo camel trek west from Alice Springs to the Western Australian coast. To a surprising extent, the travel writing of the later twentieth century continues to explore the three great ‘matters’ of the early Queensland tradition: the ‘other’, the ‘body’ and the ‘land’.Two Rigby publications illustrate the trend: Jeff Carter’s People of the Inland (1966), a traditionalist account of the human types, occupations, places and legendary events and characters of the Outback, and Across the Top (and Other Places) (1972) by Malcolm Douglas and David Oldmeadow, a more youthfully inflected series of dangerous adventures and narrow escapes. Both books ignore state and territory boundaries in order to find, overcome and celebrate, respectively,

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the alterity of the Outback (that ‘strange unknown land far beyond the horizons of most city folk’) and the hazards of the Tropical North (‘My legs had swollen badly and the crocodile bites were festering fast’).36 For Peter Pinney (1922–92), ‘travel in new places, preferably strange places’ was not a one-off expedition but a lifetime’s occupation.37 His dozen or so books, published at intervals over forty years, from Dust on My Shoes (1952) to the posthumous The Road to Anywhere (1993), are vivid narratives of his vagabond adventures on land and sea – often without money or passport – through southern Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa and Australia. His ‘bohemianism’ notwithstanding, Pinney is not an especially introspective or reflective writer; he has the classical travelwriter’s ability to keep the objective interest of other people and places in the foreground and his own personality in the background – even when, as often in the earlier books, he indulges what he would no doubt have called his eye for a pretty girl. Pinney is noteworthy for the vigour and vitality of his narratives and for the eccentricity and humour of his characters, but also for his remarkable virtuosity as a prose stylist, ranging from baroque luxuriance to laconic minimalism, and for his perfect ear for speech and dialogue, especially foreign accents. Restless Men (1966), one of two books about his travels in northern Australia, contains ten chapters set in particular Queensland places, each with its own cast of characters, from Brisbane and the Gold Coast to Rockhampton, Mackay, Normanton and the Whitsundays. In each place, the perspective Pinney adopts is not that of a spectator or tourist but the ‘inside’ view of an active participant in demanding, absorbing and always sociable physical labour – prawning, rat-catching, fettling, gardening, crocodile-hunting and shark-catching. On a rat-catching assignment with Ron and Merv, ‘Brisbane’s leading experts in the exacting art of active rat-control’, and their two fox-terriers (Dave and Lee), Pinney encounters ‘a thin old man with mottled flesh and rheumy eyes, who peered at us in fright through broken glass, whimpering and shaking and mouthing pathetic shards of pale silence’. Driving back to the city along the Hamilton reach of the Brisbane river, they see ‘the city thrust against the sky in sparkled tiers, sungilt and fat with commerce, squat with heavy shadow and splendid with glass which sucked at the sky and melted, and flared back at the sky’.38

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In the 1960s, Pinney met and married Estelle Runcie, who was working as the cook on a cray-fishing boat he was skippering in the Torres Strait. After collaborating with him on Too Many Spears (1978), a biography of Frank Jardine, Estelle Runcie Pinney has gone on to become a successful novelist in her own right.39 Gerard Lee, a later exponent of the vagabond style in travel-writing, shows just how differently that style can be used. In Eating Dog: Travel Stories (1993), the narrator tells of three Queensland journeys: one, fresh out of school, hitch-hiking from Brisbane to a Cairns commune; and the other two, ten years later, hitching to Mount Isa, then taking the bus from Mount Isa to Darwin.The perspective is at once intensely subjective and deeply detached from the people and places he encounters, although two of the people – a friendless loser and a bikie’s ex-moll – are capable of eliciting his passing sympathy.40 Very different from the vagabond writer of either type, and different too from the seekers of enlightenment, are the lady-travellers from the Mother Country – an extinct species, one might have thought, by the second half of the twentieth century. Not quite. The 1960s produced at least two books by Englishwomen narrating their travels in Australia, including Queensland, no doubt chiefly for the benefit of a British readership, although Adelaide Lubbock, the author of the earlier book Australian Roundabout (1963), aimed ‘to please both sides’ with her breezy account of a two-year journey around most of Australia with her daughter’s family. Roundabout has separate chapters on Brisbane, North Queensland and the Reef, and on Mount Isa, Mary Kathleen ‘mining’ and the outback, with much information of the ‘old-fashioned’ kind, to do with explorers, mineral discoveries, industrial development, population statistics and Australian slang.41 Of some interest, in the light of later celebrations of the Queensland house by David Malouf, Jessica Anderson and others, is her ambivalent description of that icon: Behind the verandah, and opening onto it are the rooms of the house, always pitch-dark, and communicating with each other . . . domestic life seems at first to be rather lacking in privacy to the English visitor. But this way of life has a certain charm and friendliness, in keeping with the warm-hearted character of the Queenslanders.42

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If the term ‘lady travel-writer’ sits a little uncomfortably with Adelaide Lubbock, it positively demeans Elspeth Huxley, the author of Their Shining Eldorado: A Journey Through Australia (1967). Huxley (1907–97), author of the best-selling memoir of an East African childhood, The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), and some thirty other travel books, novels and biographies, came to Australia in 1966, her international reputation as a writer, broadcaster, journalist, conservationist, government adviser and Africanist already well established. Her book on Australia, though immensely readable and entertaining, is (like Ewers in this respect) an intellectual rather than an experiential journey. It is more than a little humbling, forty years later, to note the extensive knowledge of Australian history, art and literature she brought with her, and the sophisticated grasp of serious contemporary issues she was able to acquire during her six months’ stay. Environmental problems such as land-clearing, wildlife protection, water conservation and the preservation of the Great Barrier Reef were her main interests on this trip, and there were many other areas of Australian life on which she could have commented with authority, but which, by her own admission, she ‘did not even try to sample’: education, the law, politics, industry and the economy, to name a few; not to mention (though in fact she does mention it) urbanisation: the ‘three out of every four Australians who live in cities’.43 The book is framed and threaded-through with Australian poetry: its title and epigraph are from a Henry Lawson poem, its chapter on ‘Tropical Queensland’ has a line from ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, and the final words are given to Judith Wright – a complete poem – following a union of minds between the two women at Wright’s home on Mount Tamborine, just a few months before the death of Jack McKinney. Huxley’s final chapter, ‘Birds and Beasts’, is largely taken up with a detailed and approving account of David Fleay’s wildlife sanctuary at Burleigh Heads, but it begins on a very different note: For sheer ugliness, the string of holiday resorts that straggles south of Brisbane from Southport to Tweed heads on the New South Wales border – the Gold Coast, so-called – would be hard to beat . . . it is all a visual nightmare; but it brings a lot of satisfaction to a lot of people . . . from all over Australia, and a lot of money to Queensland,

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where the value of tourism, at the present rate of growth, will soon eclipse that of beef or sugar.44 As Huxley and others foresaw, mass tourism did indeed come to dominate the Queensland economy in the later decades of the century, and travel writing was eroded, if not completely overwhelmed, by a rapidly professionalising tourism industry, with Lonely Planet guides and the like, leaving little room for idiosyncratically informative travel memoirs. Rapid transit and sheer familiarity reduce the demand for narratives of either discovery or self-discovery through travel, and some aspects of the older styles of travel writing – the celebration of industry and agriculture, the exploitation of natural resources, most notably – have in any case become politically or ethically unacceptable. Even landscape description – writing for rather than of travel – now celebrates ecological values, even as it serves the industry of tourism more directly than ever before. The controversial Caravonica to Kuranda Skyrail cableway, for example, which was criticised widely for the environmental damage resulting from its construction, is now at pains to present itself as a serious ecological journey, with information about rainforests and a periodic ‘nature diary’.45 It may seem perverse to have nominated as our final example of Queensland travel writing a book about Australia (not specifically Queensland) written forty years ago by an English polymath. A ‘whole of Queensland’ focus for travel writing may well have gone forever, an inevitable victory for history and geography over politics; and that may be no bad thing. There have been a few (subject to correction, a very few) conventional travel books with a substantial Queensland component written by Australians in the last twenty years or so, but by and large that sub-genre seems to have dissolved into the kind of tourism promotion alluded to. There is of course a large and growing body of local and regional descriptive writing, much of it still below the print-publishing horizon, but even at its best this material stretches the definition of travel writing beyond useful limits. Where the new and growing interest in literary travel writing about Queensland is being generated is outside Australia altogether, in the work of ‘foreign’ writers like Bill Bryson who bring a

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fresh perspective, and large amounts of cosmopolitan wit and humour, to what is for them a new and strange land. In this context, Bryson is the direct literary descendant of Adelaide Lubbock and Elspeth Huxley, who for that reason can be seen as less improbable harbingers of the future than they may have seemed. It is a lineage that may have brought the history of literary travel writing in Queensland full circle, back to the confrontation between self and other, home and away, that energised the narratives of the nineteenth-century explorers, pioneers and intrepid adventurers, both male and female, who deliberately placed themselves outside their comfort zones, and whose fresh perceptions – whether horrified or humorous – can help those of us who call Queensland home to refresh, intensify and perhaps even change our own perceptions of its essential character.

Endnotes

Introduction 1 Janette Turner Hospital, The Last Magician, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992, pp. 3–4. 2 Beverley Kingston, ‘Queensland’, in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 536. 3 Patrick Buckridge and Jenny Greder, eds, One Chamber Only: Queensland’s Upper House 75 Years On, Brisbane: Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University, 1997. 4 Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: Asian–Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2005. 5 Cecil Hadgraft, Queensland and Its Writers, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1959. 6 H. A. Kellow, The Queensland Poets, London: George G. Harrap, 1930. 7 J. J. Stable and A. E. M. Kirwood, eds, A Book of Queensland Verse, Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, 1924. Part1: South-East Queensland Roles for Writers: Brisbane and Literature, 1859–1975 1 ‘A First Place: the Mapping of a World’, in David Malouf: Johnno, Short Stories, Poems, Essays and Interview, ed. James Tulip, UQP Australian Authors, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1990, pp. 261ff. 2 Charles Frederick Chubb, Fugitive Pieces, Prologues, &c., Brisbane: Warwick and Sapsford, 1881.

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3 The fictionality of the name, and the name of the real individual it masked, were first discovered by Cecil Hadgraft in the 1950s. Cecil Hadgraft, Queensland and Its Writers, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1959, pp. 2–4. 4 H. A. Kellow, The Queensland Poets, London: Harrap, 1930, p. 35. 5 Kellow, p. 47. 6 Mary Eva O’Doherty, ‘Queensland’, in The Queensland Centenary Anthology, 1859–1959, eds Robert Byrnes and Val Vallis, Brisbane: Longmans, 1959, p. 12. 7 The Poetical Works of Brunton Stephens, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1912, p. 219. 8 Poetical Works, p. 211. 9 Cecil Hadgraft, James Brunton Stephens, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1969, pp. 62–63. 10 Letter to Francis Kenna, quoted by Hadgraft, James Brunton Stephens, p. 99. 11 J. B. Stephens, The Poetical Works of Brunton Stephens, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1912, p. 81. 12 Rules of the Johnsonian Club, established 1878, revised 1898, Brisbane: The Club, 1898, pp. 26–28. 13 Leanne Day, ‘Civilising the City: Literary Societies and Clubs in Brisbane during the 1880s and 1890s’, PhD dissertation, unpublished, Griffith University, 2004, p. 79. 14 John H. Nicholson, Halek; A Romance, 3rd edn, Brisbane and Sydney: Edwards, Dunlop & Co., 1904. 15 Quoted in Hadgraft, Queensland and Its Writers, p. 103. 16 Day, pp. 32–37. 17 Emily Bulcock, ‘Halek and Its Author’, The Red Page, Bulletin, Sydney, 16 August 1923. 18 R. S. Ross, ‘John Nicholson and Halek’, The Red Page, Bulletin, Sydney, 4 October 1923. 19 James Brunton Stephens, Papers, OM64-27, OM71-32, OM82-48, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland; Spencer Browne, A Journalist’s Memories, Brisbane: Read Press, 1927, p. 77. 20 R. F. Bange, Johnsonian Club, Inc., Founded 1878, Brisbane: [The Club], 1988, p. 22. 21 Rules, p. 35. 22 T. P. Lucas, The Curse and Its Cure in Two Volumes, Brisbane: J. H. Reynolds, 1894, pp. 90–100. 23 H. A. Kellow, his Scots compatriot, observed (p. 240) that ‘Dr Lucas has very definite opinions on many matters of public interest: he is anti-vivisectionist,

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30 31

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anti-socialist, anti-alcoholist, anti-nicotinist, anti-feminist, anti-evolutionist: he is also an anti-“Sweepist”: “Every sweep in the Melbourne Cup/Runs the devil’s figures up”.’ [Henry Barkley], Lyrics from the Line by ‘The Goth’, Ipswich; Railway Times office, 1898, p. 24. Arthur A. D. Bayldon, ‘In the Dead House’, Poems, Brisbane: W. H. Wendt & Co., 1897, p. 20. Bayldon, ‘The Kingdom of Despair’, Poems, p. 35. Arthur A. D. Bayldon, The Tragedy Behind the Curtain and Other Stories, Sydney: S. D. Townsend, 1910. Francis Adams, Australian Life, London: Chapman and Hall Ltd, 1892, pp. 8–9. Rosa Praed, Policy and Passion: A Novel of Australian Life, 3 vols, London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1881, p. iv. The following account of Praed draws on Belinda McKay, ‘ “The One Jarring Note”: Race and Gender in Queensland Women’s Writing to 1939’, Queensland Review 8.1, 2001, pp. 31–54. Rosa Praed, My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life, London: Unwin, 1902. In a number of her novels, Praed gives vivid physical descriptions of ‘Leichardt’s Town’ (Brisbane), especially of the Government House precinct and ‘Emu Point’ (Kangaroo Point). After leaving for England in 1876, she only visited Brisbane once, in 1895. As Patricia Clarke points out in Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999, pp. 41–42, ‘her youthful memories remained dominant’. Quoted in Colin Roderick, In Mortal Bondage:The Strange Life of Rosa Praed, Sydney and London: Angus & Robertson, 1948, p. 47. Rosa Praed, Policy and Passion, Vol. III, pp. 108–34. See Praed, Outlaw and Lawmaker, pp. 214–15, and Rosa Praed, The Luck of the Leura, London: John Long, 1907, pp 195–96. Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988, pp. 45–47. Quoted by Kellow, p. 71. Cornelius Moynihan, The Bunyip of Wendouree and Other Poems, Brisbane, 1910. The book is listed as published, but with no publisher, by E. Morris Miller and F. T. Macartney, Australian Literature: A Bibliography to 1938, Extended to 1950, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1956, p. 346. It is not listed by J. H. Hornibrook, Bibliography of Queensland Verse, Brisbane: A. H. Tucker, 1953, p. 54. Draft copy in Fryer Memorial Library, University of Queensland.

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38 Cornelius Moynihan, The Feast of the Bunya: An Aboriginal Ballad, Brisbane: Gordon & Gotch, 1901, pp. 54–55. 39 Cutting, n.d., from Brisbane Telegraph in The Bunyip of Wendouree, Fryer Library. 40 A typescript copy is listed by Miller and Macartney as deposited in the University of Queensland library, but is lost. A manuscript copy exists in the Queensland Parliamentary Library, together with the correspondence between Moynihan and the publisher, Ward Lock & Co. 41 ‘The Poet’, in Bayldon, Poems. 42 Moynihan, ‘Alas, We Have No Byron Now’, in The Bunyip of Wendourie and Other Poems. 43 Evidence for the circumstantially plausible paternity claim, which Penton himself privately alleged several times, is discussed in Patrick Buckridge, The Scandalous Penton: A Biography of Brian Penton, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994, pp. 4–9. See also ‘Brian Con Penton’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 15, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000, pp. 589–90. 44 Simon Legree is the brutal slave-overseer in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Patrick Mayne is the wild and violent meat-butcher who – rightly or wrongly – was widely suspected of robbing, murdering and dismembering one Robert Cox, a sawyer from out of town, and going on to a life of wealth and prominence. For a discussion of Mayne as a possible model for McGovern, see P. Buckridge, ‘The Mayne Scandal and the Penton Novels’, Notes & Furphies 41, October 1998, pp. 5–6. 45 This account of Landtakers draws on Buckridge, The Scandalous Penton, pp. 136–37. 46 Foott’s interview with Praed was published in The Queenslander on 26 January 1895. 47 Mary Hannay Foott, Where the Pelican Builds, Brisbane: Gordon & Gotch, 1885, p. 5. This account of Foott draws on Belinda McKay, ‘ “The One Jarring Note” ’. 48 Mary Hannay Foott, Morna Lee and Other Poems, London: Gordon & Gotch, 1890, p. 17. 49 Mabel Forrest, Alpha Centauri, Melbourne: Thomas C. Lothian, 1909, p. 8. This account of Forrest draws on Belinda McKay, ‘ “The One Jarring Note” ’. 50 Mabel Forrest, Alpha Centauri, pp. 20–21. 51 Mabel Forrest, Poems, Sydney: Cornstalk Publishing, 1927, pp. 173–74. 52 The surname ‘Coungeau’ is a gallicised version of Kongos. See Hugh Gilchrist, Australians and Greeks, Volume 1: The Early Years, p. 233. Naoum was often anglicised as ‘Norman’. This account of Coungeau draws on Belinda

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56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63 64 65

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McKay, ‘Finding Voice: Emily Coungeau and “Australia’s National Hymn of Progress” ’, Queensland Review 13.2, 2006, pp. 13–33. Emily Coungeau, ‘Queensland Pioneers’, in ‘Stella Australis’: Poems and Verses by E. Coungeau, Brisbane: Gordon & Gotch, 1916, p. 7. Emily Coungeau, ‘Australia to the Empire Mother’ and ‘Australia’s Destiny’, Stella Australis, pp. 61–63, 32–33. Emily Coungeau, ‘Australia: Enchantress’ and ‘Centenary Prize Poem, 1924: Discovery of the Brisbane River’, Palm Fronds: Poems and Verse, Brisbane: Smith and Paterson, 1927, pp. 87, 10. H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1961, vol. 1, p. 495. William Baylebridge, This Vital F lesh, Sydney: Tallabila Press, 1939. Kellow, Queensland Poets, pp. 215–29. Inglis Moore, Six Australian Poets, Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1942. Elliott, ‘William Baylebridge’, in Singing to the Cattle and Other Australian Essays, Melbourne: Georgia House, 1947, p. 127. Wright, ‘William Baylebridge and the Modern Problem’, in Because I Was Invited, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 115– 28. Hadgraft, Queensland, p. 47. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1961, p. 497. Love Redeemed, Sydney: Tallabila Press, 1934, p. 26. Moreton Miles, Brisbane: privately printed c.1910. The Modernist, ed. Douglas Price, New Farm, June 1912 – December 1916, Fryer Library, University of Queensland. For a fuller account of Austen’s life and work, see P. Buckridge, ‘Being Elsewhere: Aesthetics, Identities and Alienation in Peter Austen’s Life and Poetry’, JASAL, 5.2, 2006, pp. 133–50. Peter Austen, The Young G ods, Sydney: Tyrrell’s Ltd, 1919, pp. 35–36. The Young G ods, p. 41. Vance Palmer, The Camp, Melbourne: S. J. Endacott, 1920; reprinted in R. S. Byrnes and Val Vallis, eds, The Queensland Centenary Anthology, Brisbane: Longmans, 1959, pp. 49–50. Vance Palmer, Seedtime, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957, pp. 73–77. The first novel in Palmer’s Golconda trilogy was Golconda, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1948. The third was The Big Fellow, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, [1959]. See Pares’s memoir, I Fiddled the Years Away, Brisbane: s.n., 1943, pp. 89–100. ‘Editorial’, The Muses’ Magazine, Brisbane: The Hall of the Muses, November 1927, p. 1. J. J. Stable and A. E. M. Kirwood, eds, A Book of Queensland Verse, Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, 1924.

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70 Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988, passim. 71 Colin Bingham, The Beckoning Horizon, Melbourne: Penguin, 1983, p. 106. 72 Jack Lindsay, ‘The Rivals’, in Galmahra 1.1, Brisbane, May 1921, p. 36. 73 Jack Lindsay, Life Rarely Tells: An Autobiography in Three Volumes, London: Penguin, 1982, p. 112. 74 Lindsay, Life Ra rely Tells, p. 231. 75 Hadgraft, p. 114. 76 The uncertainty results from contradictory claims made by Colin Bingham (Beckoning Horizon, p. 139) and Paul Grano, in a letter to Victor Kennedy, 20 April 1936 (Victor Kennedy Papers, La Trobe Library, Melbourne, MS 9419/450–616). 77 Clem Christesen, letter to Carol Cooper, 24 October 1962, Meanjin Archive, uncatalogued, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. 78 Brian Vrepont, Beyond the Claw, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1943, p. 12. 79 James Picot, ‘Prickly Pear’, in With a Hawk’s Quill, Melbourne: Meanjin, 1953. 80 Paul Grano, ‘Memories of Early Meanjin’, unpublished typescript, Meanjin Archive, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. 81 Paul Grano, ‘Editor’s Note’, in Witness to the Stars, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1946, p. xi. 82 ‘Foreword’, in Witness to the Stars, pp. v–vi. 83 ‘The Church’, in Witness to the Stars, pp. 31–32. 84 ‘Prelude’, in Fabian: Poems by James Devaney, Melbourne and Sydney: Lothian Book Publishing Co., 1923, p. 7. 85 Letter to C. B. Christesen, 27 September 1946, James Devaney Papers, Meanjin Collection, University of Melbourne Library. Quoted in William Hatherell, ‘A Cultural History of Brisbane, 1940–1970’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Queensland, 2003, p. 66. 86 The Temperament of Generations: Fifty Years of Writing in Meanjin, ed. Jenny Lee, Philip Mead and Gerald Murnane, Melbourne: Meanjin/Melbourne University Press, 1990, p. 2. 87 Lee, Mead and Murnane, eds, The Temperament of Generations, p. 46. 88 Firmin McKinnon, Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 28 December 1940, quoted by Lee et al., Temperament of Generations, p. 3. 89 Ernest Briggs, ‘The Old Sweet Song’, in The Secret Listener, Brisbane: Dunrobin Edition, 1949, p. 18. 90 Quoted by F. McKinnon in The Secret Listener, Foreword, p. 5. 91 The Secret Listener, p. 25. 92 The Merciless Beauty, quoted by J. K. Ewers, Creative Writing in Australia, revised edn, Melbourne: Georgian House, 1956, p. 146.

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93 Judith Wright, ‘Brisbane in Wartime: A Draft Extract from an Autobiography in Progress’, Overland 100, 1985, p. 67. 94 Judith Wright, ‘South of My Days’, in The Moving Image, Parkville: The Meanjin Press, 1946, pp. 28–29. 95 Judith Wright, ‘Metho Drinker’, in Woman to Man, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1949, p. 35. 96 Judith Wright, ‘The Writer and the Crisis’ (1952), in Because I Was Invited, pp. 165–79. 97 Judith Wright, ‘The Maker’, in Woman to Man, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1949, p. 5. 98 Judith Wright, ‘William Baylebridge and the Modern Problem’ and ‘The Wisdom of Innocence: John Shaw Neilson’, in Because I Was Invited, pp. 115–28, 89–108. 99 This account of Barjai draws on Hatherell, ‘A Cultural History of Brisbane, 1940–1970’, pp. 59–62. 100 ‘Marigold’, in Barjai, Brisbane, 12, 1944, p. 4. 101 ‘At Brisbane, Anger’, in Barjai, Brisbane, 3, 1944, p. 200. 102 ‘The Netmaker’, in Val Vallis, Songs of the East Coast, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1997, p. 6. (This is a collected edition, not to be confused with the 1947 volume of the same title.) 103 Val Vallis, ‘At Tintagel’, in Songs, p. 61. 104 ‘Greenway Street’, in John Blight, Selected Poems, 1939–1990, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992, reprinted in 50 Years of Queensland Poetry, 1940s–1990s, ed. Philip Neilsen and Helen Horton, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1998, p. 5. 105 Gwen Harwood, ‘In Brisbane’, in Neilsen and Horton, 50Years of Queensland Poetry, p. 31. 106 David Rowbotham, ‘Brisbane’, in New and Selected Poems 1945–1993, Ringwood: Penguin, 1994. The stanza is also inscribed on Rowbotham’s brass plaque in the ‘Brisbane Literary Trail’ in Albert Street, City. 107 Patrick White, ‘The Prodigal Son’, in Patrick White Speaks, Sydney: Primavera Press, 1989, p. 15. 108 Hatherell, ‘A Cultural History of Brisbane, 1940–1970’, pp. 190–91. 109 J. S. Manifold, ‘Lawson’s Birthday’, in Nightmares and Sunhorses, Melbourne: Edwards and Shaw for Overland, 1961, p. 16. 110 ‘No Rest for Lovers’, in J. S. Manifold, Selected Verse, London: Denis Dobson, 1948, p. 35. 111 Manifold, ‘For Comrade Katharine’, Selected Verse, p. 11. 112 Manifold, ‘Contemporaries’, in Nightmares and Sunhorses, p. 45. 113 Rodney Hall’s excellent book-length study of Manifold contends that his

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under-representation in anthologies and literary histories is a result not just of his politics but because he was dismissive, in print, about the quality of Brennan and Slessor, two icons of the national canon. See R. Hall, J. S. Manifold: An Introduction to the Man and His Work, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978, pp. 36, 173. 114 ‘Heaven, In a Way’, in Australian Poetry Now, ed. T. Shapcott, Melbourne: Sun Books, 1970, p. 36. 115 ‘The Finches’, from Ten Sonnets, in Thomas W. Shapcott, Selected Poems, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978, p. 6. 116 Shapcott, ‘Music at Night’, Selected Poems, pp. 5–6. 117 Criena Rohan, The Delinquents, London: Penguin, 1986, pp. 139ff. 118 Maureen Freer, ed., Square Poets, Brisbane: Fellowship of Australian Writers, 1971. 119 Greg McCart, ed., Recent Queensland Poetry, Brisbane: Refulgence Publishers, 1975. An Unlikely City: The Making of Literary Brisbane, 1975–2001 1 Ross Fitzgerald, foreword to Robyn Sheahan-Bright and Stuart Glover, eds, Hot Iron, Corrugated Sky: 100 Years of Queensland Writing, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002, p. xiii. 2. Kevin Hart, ‘For Brisbane’, The Departure, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 62–63. 3 David Malouf, Johnno: A Novel, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975, p. 60. 4 Jessica Anderson, The Commandant, Ringwood: Penguin, 1975. Rodney Hall, A Place among People, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975. Robert Macklin, The Queenslander, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1975. 5 Malouf, Johnno, 1975, pp. 82, 84, 51–52, 51, 82. 6 Malouf, Johnno, 1975, p. 148. 7 David Malouf, ‘Preface to the 1998 Anniversary Edition’, Johnno: A Novel, Anniversary Edition, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, pp. xvi–xvii. 8 Malouf, Johnno, 1975, p. 127. 9. Malouf, Johnno, 1975, p. 4. David Malouf, 12 Edmondstone Street, Ringwood: Penguin, 1986, pp. 8–10, 46–47. 10 Hall, A Place among People, pp. 4–5, 7, 47–51, 71–76, 183–89, 206–8, 233–40. 11 Malouf, Johnno, pp. 27–29. 12 Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, Ringwood: Penguin, 1978, p. 11. ‘Jessica Anderson’, in Jennifer Ellison, ed., Rooms of Their Own, Ringwood:

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14 15

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Penguin, 1999, p. 37. Thea Astley, Reaching Tin River, Port Melbourne: Minerva Australia, 1990, p. 41. Susan Johnson, Hungry Ghosts, Sydney: Macmillan, 1996, p. 27. Andrew McGahan, Praise, North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992, p. 54. Kevin Hart, The Departure, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978, pp. 48–49, 62–63. Janette Turner Hospital, ‘The Ocean of Brisbane’, Collected Stories, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995, p. 329. Thomas Shapcott, White Stag of Exile, Ringwood: Allen Lane, 1984. Janette Turner Hospital, ‘After Long Absence’, Collected Stories, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995, pp.172–74; ‘Litany for the Homeland’, pp. 410, 412, 421. Angelika Fremd, The Glass Inferno, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992, p. 184. Mary-Rose MacColl, Angels in the Architecture, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999, p. 145. Hugh Lunn, Over the Top with Jim, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989. Tony Maniaty, All Over the Shop, Ringwood: Penguin, 1993. Craig Munro, ed., UQP: The Writers’ Press, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 9. Gwen Harwood, Blessed City: Letters to Thomas Riddell, 1943, ed. Alison Hoddinott, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990. Barbara Blackman, Glass after Glass: Autobiographical Reflections, Ringwood: Viking/Penguin Books Australia, 1997. Jessica Anderson, Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1987, p. vi. David Malouf, Harland’s Half Acre, London: Chatto & Windus, 1984. Donald Hutley, The Swan, Sydney: William Collins, 1978. Gerard Lee, True Love and How to Get It, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. Judith Arthy, Goodbye Goldilocks, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1984. Thomas Shapcott, Hotel Bellevue, London: Chatto & Windus, 1986. Susan Johnson, Messages from Chaos, Sydney: Harper & Row, 1987. Matthew Condon, The Motorcycle Café, 1988, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989. Janette Turner Hospital, Charades, 1988, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989. Janette Turner Hospital, The Last Magician, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Faith Richmond, Remembrance, 1988, Sydney: William Collins, 2000. Jay Verney, A Mortality Tale, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1991. Rosie Scott, Lives on Fire, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993. Venero Armanno, Romeo of the Underworld, Sydney: Picador, 1994. John Birmingham, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, Darlinghurst: The Yellow Press, 1994. Estelle Pinney, Time Out for Living, Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1995. Nick Earls, Zigzag Street, Sydney: Anchor, 1997. Chris Nyst, Cop This!, Sydney: HarperCollins, 1999.

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19 Anderson, Tirra Lirra, p. 1. Condon, The Motorcycle Café, p. 12. 20 Shapcott, Hotel Bellevue, p. 66. Fremd, The Glass Inferno, pp. 166, 167. Venero Armanno, Firehead, Milson’s Point: Random House, 1999, pp. 3, 7. 21 John Birmingham, ‘The Lost City of Vegas: David Malouf ’s Old Brisbane’, in Sheahan-Bright and Glover, eds, Hot Iron, Corrugated Sky, pp. 3, 4. 22 Gwen Harwood, ‘Gainful Employment’, in Andrew Sant, ed., Toads, Australian Writers: Other Work, Other Lives, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992, pp. 45–47. Gwen Harwood, Collected Poems 1943–1995, eds Alison Hoddinott & Greg Kratzmann, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003, pp. 260, 333–34, 380–81. John Birmingham, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1997. 23 Harwood, ‘Return of the Native’, pp. 333–34. Birmingham, ‘The Lost City of Vegas: David Malouf ’s Old Brisbane’, p. 7. 24 Venero Armanno, The Volcano, Milsons Pt: Knopf/Random House Australia, 2001. Robert Morris, ‘A Little Tune You Just Might Know’, Small Packages 5, Carina: New Century Press, 2001, p. 57. Ross Clark, ‘Escaping Cloudland’, Small Packages 7, Carina: New Century Press, 2003, pp. 38–39. Michael Sariban, ‘Softlights and Bulldozers’, A Formula for Glass, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987, p. 32. 25 Thomas Shapcott, ‘The Joyner Act: A Queensland Text’, Welcome, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983, p. 29. Lee, True Love, pp. 185–87. 26 Manfred Jurgensen, ‘Jacarandas’, The Skin Trade, Brisbane: Phoenix Publications, 1983, p. 89. 27 Ross Fitzgerald, Pushed from the Wings: An Entertainment, illus. by Moir, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986; All About Anthrax, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1987; Busy in the Fog: Further Adventures of Grafton Everest, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990; Soaring, illus. by David Allen, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994. 28 B. R. Dionysius, ‘Kangaroo Point Field, 1830’, Bacchanalia, Brisbane: Interactive Press, 2002, pp. 1–2. Samuel Wagan Watson, ‘last exit to Brisbane . . .’, Itinerant Blues, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002, p. 47. Melissa Lucashenko, Hard Yards, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999, pp. 133–34, 1–2. 29 Nick Earls, ‘Queensland Is Different’, Courier-Mail, Writing Queensland 2000, 30 June 2000, p. 3. ‘Thomas Shapcott’ in Candida Baker, ed., Yacker: Australian Writers Talk about Their Work, Sydney: Picador, 1986, pp. 286–87. Nigel Krauth, ‘The Big Theme Park: One Writer’s Queensland’, Australian Book Review 194, September 1997, p. 36. Nigel Krauth, Matilda, My Darling, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983. 30 David Malouf, ‘Brisbane – The View from a Small Italian Village’, interview

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with Jill Rowbotham, Courier-Mail, 30 April 1983, p. 24; David Malouf, ‘An Imaginative Life’, interview with Rosemary Neill, Review, Weekend Australian, 30 September – 1 October 2006, p. 5. Sheahan-Bright and Glover, eds, Hot Iron, Corrugated Sky, p. 69. Adrian McGregor, ‘Surviving the Winter of Discontent’, Weekend Australian, 25–26 October 2003, Books Extra, p. 4. Thomas Shapcott, ‘The Feel and the Smell of Brisbane’, Courier-Mail, 5 April 1982, Books, p. 5. Andrew McGahan, Last Drinks, St Leonard’s, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Stuart Glover and Stuart Cunningham, ‘The New Brisbane’, Artlink, 23.2, June 2003, p. 18. Lara Cain, ‘Hitting Home: Nick Earls’ Brisbane and the Creation of the Celebrity Author’, Queensland Review, 12.1, 2005, pp. 47–58. Stuart Glover, ‘The Bountiful Decade: Writing and Government in Queensland in the 1990s’, QWC News, June 2000, p. 8. Delys Bird, ‘New Narrations: Contemporary Fiction’, in Elizabeth Webby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 196. Katherine Wilson, Editorial, p. 8; ‘Pride and Prejudice: 10 Years of Writing in Queensland’, QWC News, June 2000, p. 10. Helen Demidenko, The Hand that Signed the Paper, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1991. David Bentley, ‘The Hand that Won the Franklin’, Courier-Mail, 2 June 1995, p. 1. John Jost, Gianna Totaro and Christine Tyshing, eds, The Demidenko File, Ringwood: Penguin, p. 27. David Malouf, Remembering Babylon, 1993, London: Vintage, 1994. Thea Astley, Drylands, 1999; Ringwood: Penguin, 2000. Wilson, Editorial. www.papertigermedia.com. Queensland: A State for the Arts, Report of the Arts Committee, February 1991, Brisbane: Arts Division, Department of the Premier, Economic and Trade Development, 1991, pp. 93, 94. Glover, ‘The Bountiful Decade’. Communication from Jane Humphreys, Publications and Projects, QWC, 3 October 2006. Stuart Glover, ‘Case-study: Literature and the State’, in Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright, eds, Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946–2005, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006, pp. 168, 172, 173. McGahan, Last Drinks, pp. 74–75. Melissa Lucashenko, Steam Pigs, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, p. 6. Earls, Zigzag Street, pp. 34, 37. Venero Armanno, ‘Where Bread Is Sweet’, in Nigel Krauth and Robyn Sheahan, eds, Paradise to Paranoia: New Queensland Writing, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995, p. 211.

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40 McGahan, Last Drinks, p. 142. 41 McGahan, Last Drinks, pp. 120, 163. 42 McGahan, Last Drinks, p. 77. Natural Imaginings:The Literature of the Hinterland 1 Janette Turner Hospital, The Last Magician, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992, p. 4. 2 See, for example, Tim Flannery, ed., Terra Australis: Matthew Flinders’ Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000; John Oxley, Report of an Expedition to Survey Port Curtis, Moreton Bay, and Port Bowen, London, 1825; F. W. Ludwig Leichhardt, The Letters of F. W. Ludwig Leichhardt, collected and newly translated by M. Aurousseau, 3 vols, London: published for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press, 1968. 3 Tom Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland, recorded by Constance Campbell Petrie, Brisbane: Watson, Ferguson, 1904, p. 12. 4 Enid Bell, Legends of the Coochin Valley, Brisbane: Bunyip Press, [1946], unpaginated. Thomas Welsby, The Collected Works of Thomas Welsby, edited A. K. Thomson, 2 vols, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1967. Welsby’s seven books on Moreton Bay were originally published between 1905 and 1937. 5 Quoted in Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998, p. 192. 6 Kath Walker [Oodgeroo Noonuccal], Stradbroke Dreamtime, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. 7 F. Corkling, ‘Moreton Bay’, in Steele Rudd’s Magazine, October 1905, pp. 867–72. 8 Cornelius Moynihan, The Feast of the Bunya: An Aboriginal Ballad, Brisbane: Gordon & Gotch, 1901, pp. 14, 31–33, 23, 22. Roy Connolly, Southern Saga, London: Grayson and Grayson, 1940. See also Belinda McKay and Patrick Buckridge, ‘Literary Imaginings of the Bunya’, in Queensland Review, 9.2 (2002), 65–79. 9 Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves, London: Jonathan Cape, 1976. 10 Rosa Praed, Policy and Passion: A Novel of Australian Life, 3 vols, London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1881. Rosa Praed, The Head Station: A Novel of Australian Life, London: Chapman and Hall, 1885. Rosa Praed, Outlaw and Lawmaker, 1893; London: Pandora, 1987. 11 Praed, Outlaw and Lawmaker, pp. 254, 2. The mountains in Praed’s Logan Valley novels are fictionalised and sometimes conflated representations of Mt Lindesay, Mt Barney, Mt Ernest and Mt Maroon, the mountains near her father’s property, ‘Maroon’, where she spent part of her teenage years.

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12 J. J. Stable and A. E. M. Kirwood, eds, A Book of Queensland Verse, Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, 1924, p xii. 13 Francis Kenna, Songs of a Season, Melbourne: Melville, Mullen and Slade, 1895, pp. 40–42. 14 Emily Coungeau, ‘The Glasshouse Mountains, Queensland’, Stella Australis: Poems,Verses and Prose Fragments, Brisbane: Gordon & Gotch, 1914, p. 30. 15 Alice Ham, Coward or Hero? Being a Collection of Poetical Works by Alice Ham, Brisbane: Brisbane Printers Ltd, 1928, p. 21. 16 Emily Hemans Bulcock, Jacaranda Blooms and Other Poems, Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, [c. 1923], pp. 23–24, 46. 17 Emily Hemans Bulcock, From Quenchless Springs, Brisbane: privately published, 1945, unpaginated. 18 Vivian Smith, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1975, p. 33. 19 Nettie Palmer, 19 January 1929, Nettie Palmer: Her Private Journal Fourteen Years, Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays, ed. Vivian Smith, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988, pp. 40–41. 20 Vance Palmer, The Passage, [1930], 1st Australian edn, Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens, 1944, p. 279. 21 Eleanor Dark, ‘The Quick Return’, Lantana Lane, London and Sydney, Collins, 1959, p. 141. Dark and her husband Eric spent every winter, and two summers, farming at Bopplenut, Montville, between 1951 and 1957. See Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark, Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life, Sydney: Macmillan, 1998. 22 See Michael Meadows, Robert Thomson and Wendy Stewart, ‘Close to the Edge: Imagining Climbing in Southeast Queensland’, Queensland Review 7.2 (2000), 67–83. 23 Bernard O’Reilly, Green Mountains, Brisbane: W. R. Smith and Paterson, 1940, p. 23. 24 Judith Wright, ‘Conservation as a Concept’, Wildlife Newsletter, 16 August 1968, unpaginated; quoted in Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of J udith Wright, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998, p. 299. 25 Judith Wright, ‘The Lost Man’, Collected Poems: 1942–1985, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994, p. 112. 26 Judith Wright, ‘At Cooloolah’, Collected Poems: 1942–1985, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994, pp. 140–41. 27 Judith Wright, ‘The Morning of the Dead’, Collected Poems: 1942–1985, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994, p. 209. 28 Kath Walker [Oodgeroo Noonuccal], ‘The Dispossessed’, We Are Going, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1964, p. 16. The title poem, ‘We Are Going’ (p. 25), is dedicated to Grannie Coolwell.

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29 Walker, ‘Gooboora, the Silent Pool’, We Are Going, p. 29. 30 Walker, ‘The Past’, in The Dawn Is at Hand: Poems by Kath Walker, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966, p. 25. 31 Walker, Stradbroke Dreamtime, p. 14. 32 Walker, Stradbroke Dreamtime, pp. 100–3. 33 Michael Sariban, Facing the Pacific, Carindale, Qld: Interactive Press, 1999. David Malouf, ‘Glasshouse Mountains’, in The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems, New York: George Braziller, 1979, pp. 28–29; ‘Deception Bay’ and ‘The Crab Feast’ in First Things Last: Poems, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1980, pp. 16–23, 28–37. 34 Turner Hospital, The Last Magician, p. 3. 35 Frank Moorhouse, keynote address, ‘Imagining the Gold Coast’ conference, Gold Coast Campus of Griffith University, 24 October 1998. 36 Keith Leopold, My Brow Is Wet, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1969, pp. 29, 31. Thea Astley, The Acolyte, 1972; St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1980, p. 95. David Malouf, Johnno: A Novel, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975, p. 55. Peter Goldsworthy, Honk If You Are Jesus, Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1992. Matthew Condon, A Night at the Pink Poodle, Sydney: Arrow, 1995, p. 309. 37 Elizabeth Webb, Into the Morning, London: Heinemann, 1958, pp. 153, 219. 38 Thea Astley, The Acolyte, Angus & Robertson 1972; St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1980, p. 15; Georgia Savage, The Estuary, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987, p. 181. 39 David Malouf, Fly Away Peter, 1982; London: Vintage, 1999, pp. 113, 132–33. 40 Helen Garner, ‘Postcards from Surfers’, Postcards from Surfers, Melbourne: McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1985, p. 5. 41 Matthew Condon, A Night at the Pink Poodle, Sydney: Arrow, 1995, pp. 23, 102. 42 David Malouf, ‘Glasshouse Mountains’, The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems, pp. 28–29. 43 Eleanor Dark, ‘The Blackall Range Country’, Walkabout, 1 November, 1955, p. 20. 44 Melissa Lucashenko, Steam Pigs, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, p. 244. Thea Astley, The Slow Natives, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965. 45 Peter Carey, War Crimes, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979. 46 Nancy Cato, The Noosa Story: A Study in Unplanned Development, Milton: Jacaranda Press, 1979. 47 Matthew Condon, A Night at the Pink Poodle, Sydney: Arrow, 1995, p. 304.

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‘From Progress into Stand-still Days’: Literature, History and the Darling Downs 1 Maurice French, ‘Introduction: The Eye of the Traveller’, in Travellers in a Landscape: Visitors’ Impressions of the Darling Downs 1827–1954, Maurice French, ed., Toowoomba: University of Southern Queensland Press, 1994, p. 2. 2 N. B. Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, pp. 13–14, 17. 3 Maurice French, Conflict on the Condamine:Aborigines and the European Invasion, Toowoomba: University of Southern Queensland Press, 1989, pp. 6, 7, 10. 4 French, Travellers, p. 76. 5 French, Conflict, pp. 97–98. 6 Steele Rudd, The Romance of Runnibede, Sydney: N.S.W. Bookstall Co. Ltd., 1927, pp. 135–136. 7 French, Travellers, p. 52. 8 James Arrowsmith, ‘The Raid of the Aborigines: A Heroic Poem after the Style of Virgil and Homer’, Moreton Bay Courier, 24 February 1854. French, Travellers, pp. 60–65. 9 J. L. Blyth and P. T. McNally, Darling Downs Writers: A Bibliography, Toowoomba: Darling Downs Institute Press, 1989, p. 24. 10 Arthur Hodgson, Emigration to the Australian Settlements, London: Trelawny Saunders, 1849. French, Travellers, pp. 75–77. 11 H. Berkeley Jones, Adventures in Australia in 1852 and 1853, London: Bentley, 1853. French, Travellers, p. 106. 12 Berkeley Jones, in French, Travellers, p. 106. 13 See D. B. Waterson, Squatter, Selector and Storekeeper: A History of the Darling Downs 1859–93, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968. 14 Jim Hoy, ‘John Ise and Steele Rudd: The Literary Response to Homesteading in America and Selecting in Australia’, Antipodes 11.2, December 1997, pp. 91–94. 15 Richard Fotheringham, In Search of Steele Rudd, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995. 16 Fotheringham, pp. 94–117. 17 French, Travellers, p. 3. 18 Veronica Kelly, ‘George Essex Evans the Playwright’, Margin 19, 1987, pp. 1–6. 19 Delia Birchley, The Life and Works of George Essex Evans 1863–1909, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1978, pp. 156–76. See also Margaret O’Hagan, ‘George Essex Evans’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 8, Melbourne, 1976.

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20 D. J. Murphy, ‘William Kidston’, in Denis Murphy, Roger Joyce and Margaret Cribb, eds, The Premiers of Queensland, revised edition, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1990, p. 233. 21 Chris Tiffin, ‘Metaphor and Emblem: George Essex Evans’s Public Poetry’, Literary Criterion 26.4, 1991, pp. 61–74. 22 Robert Dixon, ‘Literature and Melodrama’, The Oxford Literary History of Australia, Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss, eds, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 66–88. 23 George Essex Evans, ‘The Women of the West’, The Secret Key and Other Verses, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1906. Reprinted in Christopher Lee, ed., Turning the Century: Writing of the 1890s, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999, p. 81. 24 Groom was the son of William Groom, the architect of the Queensland Selection Acts. Undated newspaper clipping from the Toowoomba Chronicle, Ladies’ Literary Society Archives, Toowoomba Municipal Library. 25 Christopher Lee, ‘A Society of Country Women and the Functions of Literary Property’, Designing Women, Margaret Maynard, ed., Journal of Australian Studies 52, 1997, pp. 138–47. 26 See Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, London, 1908, pp. 311–46. 27 ‘Editorial’, The Lamp, no. 1, 1918, p. 3. 28 Programs in Ladies’ Literary Society Archives, Toowoomba Municipal Library. 29 Morley Grainger, ‘Toowoomba Ladies’ Literary Society History: An Interview with Connie Davidson’, 27 January 1998. 30 The definitive biography is by Crist’s grand-daughter, Dimity Dornan, Alice with Eyes A-Shine: Seedlings of an Irish-Australian Girlhood, Virginia, Brisbane: Church Archivists’ Press, 1998. 31 Alice Guerin Crist, ‘The Way of the Bush’, When Rody Came to Ironbark and Other Verses, Sydney: Cornstalk, 1927, pp. 78, 79, 80. 32 Alice Guerin Crist, Go It! Brothers!, Sydney: Pellegrini, 1932, p. 16. 33 Margaret Curran, ‘Buying Fish’, The Wind Blows High and Low and Other Verses, Brisbane: Carter Watson, 1928, p. 27. 34 Curran, ‘Anzac Eve’, p. 12. 35 Barbara Ross, ‘Drawn by “Dossie” ’, Voices 1.4, Summer 1991–92, pp. 21–30; and ‘Dorothy Cottrell’s Grey Country: Extracts from ‘Wheelrhyme’, Coppertales 2, 1995, pp. 7–16. 36 Dorothy Cottrell , The Singing Gold, 1928, Angus & Robertson, 1958, p. 42. 37 Bulletin, 26 May 1943, p. 2. 38 C. J. H. O’Brien, ‘Of the Earth Earthy’, Southerly 8.3, 1947, pp. 175–78.

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39 Margaret Trist, Morning in Queensland, London: W. H. Allen, 1958, pp. 252–53. 40 David Rowbotham, ‘For the Darling Downs’, Ploughman and Poet, Sydney: Lyre Bird Writers and CLF, 1954, p. 9. 41 Rowbotham, ‘Old Peter’, Ploughman and Poet, p. 17. 42 Rowbotham, ‘The Farmer’s Wife’, Ploughman and Poet, p. 22. 43 John Strugnell, David Rowbotham: Artist in Queensland, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1969, p. 24. 44 Rowbotham, Ploughman and Poet, p. 20. 45 David Malouf, ‘Some Volumes of Selected Poems of the 1970s II,’ Australian Literary Studies 10.3, May 1982, p. 302. 46 Strugnell, p. 59. 47 Ken Goodwin, Adjacent Worlds: A Literary Life of Bruce Dawe, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1988. 48 Mark McLeod, ‘Bruce Dawe and the Americans’, Australian Literary Studies 9.2, 1979, pp. 143–55. 49 Bruce Dawe, ‘Drifters’, Condolences of the Season: Selected Poems, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1971, p. 60. 50 Bruce Dawe, ‘Provincial City’, Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954– 1992, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992, pp. 123–24. 51 Bruce Dawe, ‘Two Ways of Considering Fog’, A Need of a Similar Name, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1965, p. 30. 52 Dawe, ‘The Vision Splendid’, Sometimes Gladness, p. 182. 53 Dawe, ‘Bad Days’, Sometimes Gladness, p. 209. 54 Dawe, ‘Today’, A Need of a Similar Name, p. 21. 55 Dawe, ‘The Affair’, Sometimes Gladness, p. 204. 56 Jean Kent, ‘Verandah Poems: Under a Roof of Rippled Tin’, Verandahs, Sydney: Hale & Ironmonger, 1990, p. 15. 57 Jean Kent, ‘From the Bottom of the Range, The View’, Verandahs, pp. 19, 21. 58 Jean Kent, ‘In a Provincial City, Cycling to School’, Practising Breathing, Sydney: Hale & Ironmonger, 1991, pp. 76, 77. 59 Robert Stewart, ‘Poetry Inspired by Own Life’, review of Practising Breathing by Jean Kent, Newcastle Herald, 21 March 1992, p. 48. 60 Jean Kent, ‘A Dream of Refuge’, Verandahs, pp. 93–94. 61 See, for example, Clinton Walker, ‘Andrew McGahan’, Rolling Stone, December 1992, pp. 84–85. Andrew McGahan, Praise, North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. Andrew McGahan, The White Earth, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004. 62 Jillian Watkinson, The Architect, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press,

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2000. See Christopher Lee, ‘Character, Disability and the Pleasures of the Body’, review of The Architect by Jillian Watkinson, Coppertales 7, 2001. Part 2: Central Queensland (Re)Writing Traditions: The Bush Ethos in Central Queensland Writing 1 Thea Astley, ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of Literary and Geographical Conceit’, Southerly 36, 1976, p. 252. 2 George Vowles, Sunbeams in Queensland, Brisbane: Rogers and Harley, 1870. 3 J. J. Stable and A. E. M. Kirwood, eds, A Book of Queensland Verse, Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, 1924, p. xvi. Forbes also used the name ‘Alick the Poet’. 4 Alexander Forbes, ‘The State of Queensland: Written in 1867’, in Voices from the Bush, Rockhampton: Northern Argus, 1869, p. 23. 5 Alexander Forbes, ‘The Digger’s Grave’, in Voices from the Bush, Rockhampton: Northern Argus Office, 1869, p. 3. George Loyau, ‘Lines written on the hearing of the death of Martin O’Brien and G. Blair at the Dawson River 1858’, in ‘Poetical Works’, manuscript, Mitchell Library, pp. 99 ff. 6 See Denis Cryle, ‘The Journalist as Entertainer: George E. Loyau’, in Denis Cryle (ed.), Disreputable Profession: Journalists and Journalism in Colonial Australia, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1997, pp. 151–55. 7 Loyau, ‘Lines written …’, in ‘Poetical Works’, p. 99. 8 George Vowles, ‘A Murder in the Bush’, Sunbeams in Queensland, Brisbane: Rogers and Harley, 1870, pp. 60-62; ‘Soliloquy of an Aboriginal (Over the body of the first white man slain in Australia by one of his race)’, p. 146. 9 Forbes, ‘The Death of Halligan’, in Voices from the Bush, pp. 63–64. 10 Loyau, ‘To Mr T.H. – a well known Quack’, in ‘Poetical Works’, p. 111. 11 Forbes, ‘Professor Holloway’, in Voices from the Bush, pp. 36–38. 12 Anonymous, ‘The Kenniffs’, in Merv Lilley, Git Away Back!: A Knockabout Life, Sydney: Currency Press, 1983, pp.131–133. 13 Anonymous, ‘The Breelong Blacks’, in Lilley, Git Away Back!, pp. 125–129. 14 P. D. Peter Coughran, The Wreck of the Rockhampton Mail and Other Verses, Rockhampton: Federal Press, n.d., pp. 20–21, 3–4. 15 Rachel Henning, The Letters of Rachel Henning, ed. David Adams, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. First published as ‘The Letters of Rachel Henning’ in Sydney Bulletin, 12 December 1951. 16 1901 letter, quoted in Colin Roderick, In Mortal Bondage:The Strange Life of Rosa Praed, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1948, pp. 46, 47.

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17 Rosa Praed, My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902, p. 107. 18 Philip Durham Lorimer, untitled, Songs and Verses, London: Clowes and Sons, 1901, p. 19. 19 Rosa Praed, Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land, 1915; London: Pandora, 1987, p. 115. 20 Judith Wright,The Generations of Men, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 18. 21 Wright, Generations of Men, pp. 57–58. 22 Raymond Stanley, ed., Tourist to the Antipodes: William Archer’s ‘Australian Journey 1876–77’, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977, p. 23. 23 Lala Fisher, ‘A Twilight Teaching’, A Twilight Teaching and Other Poems, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898. 24 Lala Fisher, ‘To the Story-Makers’, in Lala Fisher, ed., By Creek and Gully: Stories and Sketches Mostly of Bush Life.Told in Prose and Rhyme. By Australian Writers in England, Colonial Edition, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899, p. 5. 25 Lala Fisher, Grass Flowering: Verses, Sydney: Caxton Printing Works, 1915. Lala Fisher, Earth Spiritual, Sydney: Caxton Printing Works, 1918. 26 Noreen Neville, ‘Homestead Clearing Sale’, in Len Kingston, Aramac 1870– 1984: A Pictorial History, Bundaberg: L. Kingston, 1984, p. 40. 27 Rockhampton Writers’ Club, IMP, April 1974, p. 22. 28 Elsie MacDonald and Phyllis Wilson, eds, A First Anthology: Poetry and Short Prose: Selected Works from 1972–1982, Rockhampton: Rockhampton Writers’ Club, 1982, p. 54. 29 Mrs Patchett Martin [Harriet Anne Martin], ‘Cross Currents’, in Fisher, By Creek and Gully, pp. 9–51. 30 Lala Fisher, ‘His Luck’, in Fisher, ed., By Creek and Gully, pp. 111–118; ‘The Sleeping Sickness of Lui the Kanaka’, p. 258. 31 Peter James, ‘The Mount Myles Story’, in Stories of Central Queensland, Brisbane: Boolarong, 1982, pp. 24–25. 32 ‘Played in the Banjo’, in The Fitzroy Writers, The Discerning Pen 1.4, 1988, p. 11. 33 Lex McLennan, ‘He Hails from Snowy River’, in The Spirit of the West: or Ballads of Cattle Land, Sydney: Dymock’s Book Arcade, 1943, pp. 54–55. Lilley, ‘The Drovers’, in Git Away Back, p. 319. 34 Ray Malone, ‘Gordon Page’, in Bad Poems: Top Blokes, Mackay: Info Publishing, 1996, p. 6. 35 The Rockhampton Laughing Jackass, 6 October – 10 December 1881, 24 December 1881. 36 The Critic, 29 November 1908.

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37 This section, on the ‘Rockhampton School’, was written by Patrick Buckridge. 38 H. A. Kellow, The Queensland Poets, London & Sydney: George G. Harrap, 1930, pp. 186-212. 39 Kellow, p. 189. 40 Henry A. Birkbeck, Cupid and Psyche, Rockhampton: Daily Northern Argus, 1875, p. 3. 41 Heber Hedley Booth, Opalodes: Patriotic and Miscellaneous Verses, Brisbane: Powell and Co., 1909, p. 83. 42 George Herbert Rogers, ‘A Sonnet Described’, Poems, [London: The Favil Press], 1928, p. 52. 43 J. H. Hornibrook, Bibliography of Queensland Verse with Biographical Notes, Brisbane: A. H. Tucker, 1953, p. 24. 44 Lance Fallaw, Preface, An Ampler Sky, London: Macmillan, 1909, p. v. 45 Fallaw, ‘A Queensland House-Warming’, Ampler Sky, p. 59. 46 Fallaw, ‘A Queensland House-Warming’, Ampler Sky, pp. 61-62. 47 Lance Fallaw, Unending Ways, Melbourne: Edward A. Vidler. 1926, p. 37. 48 For more information on Amiet, see Cheryl Frost (Taylor), ‘W. A. Amiet: Literature and the R.S.L.’, LiNQ, 5.3, 1977, pp. 27-33. His Mercury reviews are selected in Scrambled Scrutinies, South Brisbane: Watson Ferguson, 1949. 49 E. G. Tomkins, Droving Experiences by Jackey Know Nothing, Rockhampton: Rockhampton Bulletin Office, 1890, p. 21. 50 Geoffrey Bolton, ‘The 1891 Shearers’ Strike Leaders: Railroaded’ in Rick Palmer, ed., The Shearers Strike 1891–1991: A Celebration, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, 1992. 51 Praed, Lady Bridget, pp. 158–60. 52 Heber Hedley Booth, ‘Queensland in 1902–03’, in Opalodes: Patriotic and Miscellaneous Verses, Brisbane: Powell, 1909, p. 25. 53 Lance Fallaw, ‘A Queensland House-Warming’, in An Ampler Sky, London: Macmillan, 1909, p. 53. 54 Booth, Opalodes, pp. 22–23. 55 Lilley, ‘Not Quite Fit for Heroes’, Git Away Back, pp. 243–244. 56 J. H. Wood, ‘A Rebel Lay’, in Through the Window: (A Window Cleaner Views the World), Melbourne: Fraser and Jenkinson, 1937, p. 526. 57 Fred L. Strutt, The Song of an Outback Bloke and Other Verses, Rockhampton: Rockhampton Sub-Branch RSSILA, [1936]. 58 Ted Smith, Bundaberg in Verse:The Years between the Wars 1919–1939, Bundaberg: Hamilton-Smith, 1993, pp. 4–6, 7–8, 2, 23–24, 3. 59 James Maizey and Claire Williams, The Orphan Swaggy, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1996, pp. 106, 107.

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60 Norman Norman, Recollections of a Rolling Stone: Being the Reminiscences of a Globe-trotter and Philosopher, St Martin’s Court, London: Lincoln Williams, n.d., p. 150. 61 Strutt, Song of an Outback Bloke, p. 4. 62 Lilley, Git Away Back, p. 68. 63 Central Queensland Herald, 1 May 1930, p. 12. 64 L. A. Sigsworth, ‘Tramp a Long Road at Night Time’, Central Queensland Herald, 2 January 1930, pp. 4–5. 65 Central Queensland Herald, 13 March 1930, p. 12, and 29 May 1930, p. 13. 66 Central Queensland Herald, 5 January 1933, p. 12. 67 See R. S. Medew, ‘Women Writers of the Dawson Valley’, typescript, Rockhampton and District Historical Society, n.d. 68 Central Queensland Herald, 8 May 1938, 13 October 1938, 5 January 1933, 30 March 1933. 69 Central Queensland Herald, 9 March 1933, p. 12. 70 Mary House, Lest We Forget: Poems of the Dawson Valley, Brisbane: Brooks, 1946. 71 Strutt, Song of an Outback Bloke, pp. 10, 14–15, 16–17, 27. 72 Norman, ‘Après la Guerre’, Recollections of a Rolling Stone, p. 151. 73 Bob Read, Little People: Poets and Places of Sarina, Rockhampton: Anderson Printing, n.d., p. 30. 74 Jean Renew, ‘Anzac Day’, The Fitzroy Writers, The Discerning Pen 2.3, 1989. 75 Henry Kellow ‘An Old Boy’, Rockhampton Grammar School Magazine 8, June 1923, pp. 70–71. 76 Rogers, ‘To Mrs Wheeler’, Poems, p. 64. 77 Mary Rattenbury, ‘To Mrs Wheeler’, Pen Blossoms: Verse from the Garden of Years, Yeppoon, Queensland, 1936, p. 30. 78 Wood, Through the Window, pp. 510, 521–23. 79 Read, Little People, pp. 120, 139–40. 80 Shirley Jones, comp., Australia Remembers: Commemorative Booklet of Memories: Mackay Queensland 1995, Mackay: Australia Remembers Committee, 1995, pp. 18, 37. 81 Rattenbury, ‘Who Fights the Greatest Fight?’, Pen Blossoms, p. 93. 82 Doug Wallace, ‘The Cost of Free Verse’, in The Fitzroy Writers, The Discerning Pen 1.1, May 1988, p. 6. 83 Noel Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage, ed. Roger Keesing, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1989, pp. 37, 169. 84 Mabel Edmund, Hello, Johnny!: Stories of My Aboriginal and South Sea Islander Family, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1996, p. 5.

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85 Bernard John Bettridge, ‘I Was Too Young’, in Elizabeth Perkins and R. G. Hay, eds, From All Walks of Life: An Anthology of Regional Queensland Writers, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1995, pp. 17–18. 86 Jean Renew, ‘A WAAF in Radar: World War II’, in Perkins and Hay, eds, From All Walks of Life, p. 57. 87 Valda Busttin Winsor, Island That We Knew, North Mackay: V. Winsor, 1982, p. 77. 88 Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage, p. 37. 89 Edmund, Hello, Johnny!, p. 5. 90 Lex McLennan, ‘Mulvaney’, The Spirit of the West, pp. 11–12; ‘Horsemen’s Country’, pp. 18–19; ‘“Boomerang” Brady’, pp. 56–57; ‘Queensland Steers’, p. 48. 91 Val Vallis, Dark Wind Blowing, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1961, p. 26. See also Val Vallis, Songs of the East Coast, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1947. 92 Val Vallis, Songs of the East Coast, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University, 1997, p. vii. (This is a collected edition of Vallis’s poetry, not a reissue of his earlier volume of the same title.) See Fallaw, Ampler Sky. 93 R. S. Porteous, Cattleman, Sydney: Australasian Pub. Co., in association with George G. Harrap, London, 1960. Morning Bulletin, 2 September 1965, p. 12. 94 Robert Dixon, ‘Porteous, Richard Sydney (1896–1963)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp. 19–20. 95 James, Stories of Central Queensland, pp. v, 51. 96 Charlie Marshall, One Last Shot, Thangool: C. Marshall, 1993, p. 47. 97 The Fitzroy Writers, The Discerning Pen 1.1, May 1988, p. 4. 98 Marshall, One Last Shot, p. 68. 99 Esme Gollschewsky, ‘The Women at Rebe’s’, Southerly 1, 1970, pp. 10–18. E. A. Gollschewsky, ‘Where’s Grandpa?’, Quadrant 9, November–December 1965, pp. 52–58. 100 Merv Lilley, ‘Through Every Grey Dawn IV’, Cautious Birds, South Bentley, WA: West Australian Institute of Technology Press, 1973, unpaginated. 101 Lilley, Git Away Back!, pp. 203, 316. 102 Eric Mackenzie, ‘The Coal Miners’, in Rodney Hall, ed., Poems from Prison, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1973, p. 48. 103 ‘In Memoriam’, The Critic, 27 November 1908, unpaginated. 104 L. C. Yummon, Toil, Despair and Tears: Australian Poems, Devon: Stockwell, 1983, p. 22 and pp. 5–7. 105 Malone, ‘The Cattlemen’s Strike’, Bad Poems,Top Blokes, p. 29. 106 Neil Florence, ‘Shearer’s Strike 1957’ [sic] in Capricorn Coast Writers, Australia Remembers 1945–1995 14, pp. 108 ff.

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107 James, ‘The Enforcer’, Stories of Central Queensland, pp. 89–105. 108 Ronald McKie, The Crushing, Sydney: Collins, 1977, p. 193. 109 Ronald McKie, The M ango Tree, Sydney: Collins, 1974. 110 Phil Brown, ‘The Mango Tree’, in MacDonald and Wilson, eds, First Anthology, p. 8. 111 Thea Astley, A Kindness Cup, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1974. 112 Judith Wright, The Cry for the Dead, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 5. 113 Wright, Cry for the Dead, pp. 279–80. 114 Judith Wright, ‘Seven Songs from a Journey’, Collected Poems: 1942–1985, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1994, pp. 134, 135, 137. 115 A Selection of Poems from the Bundaberg Arts Festival 1977, 78, 79, Bundaberg: Bundaberg Arts Festival Committee, 1980. 116 Elsie MacDonald, ‘A Selection of Queensland Writers’, in Elsie MacDonald, Violet Hoare and Mercedes Birkbeck, compilers, 2200 Years Under Capricorn, vol. 1, Rockhampton: Rockhampton Writers’ Club, 1988, p. 23. 117 R. G. Hay, ‘Ceremonial Site’, Love and the Outer World: Selected Poems, Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, James Cook University, 1984, p. 11. 118 Noel Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage, p. 169. 119 Faith Bandler, Wacvie: A Novel, Adelaide: Rigby, 1977. 120 Eric MacKenzie, ‘Breaking Camp’, in Hall, ed., Poems from Prison, p. 40. 121 Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage, p. 50. 122 Edmund, Hello, Johnny!, p. 30. 123 Marilyn Arnold, ‘The Ballad of Mosquito’, in The Rockhampton Writers’ Club 1966–1996: Its Writers – Its History, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1996, pp. 13–14. 124 Marilyn Arnold, ‘We Australians’, in Rockhampton Writers’ Club, IMP, Summer 1976, p. 23. 125 Eric MacKenzie, ‘A Time Together’, in Hall, ed., Poems from Prison, pp. 44–45. 126 Margaret Brice, ‘Jingi’, in The Rockhampton Writers’ Club 1966–1996, pp. 54–56. Part 3: Western Queensland ‘Where the Pelican Builds’: Writing in the West 1 Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History, Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966, p. viii. 2 Suzanne Falkiner, Wilderness, East Roseville, NSW: Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 135.

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3 Craig Munro, quoted in Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss, eds, The Oxford Literary History of Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 157. 4 Elizabeth Teather, ‘Contesting Rurality: Country Women’s Social and Political Networks’, in Sarah Whatmore, Terry Marsden and Philip Lowe, eds, Gender and Rurality, London: David Fulton Publishers, 1994, pp. 31–49. 5 Sir Thomas L. Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia: In Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848, pp. 308–9, 312. 6 Robin O’Connell, ‘Theme and Variation’, in Mark Svendsen, ed., Dust Road Coming, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1998, pp. 44–45. 7 R. M. Williams with Olaf Ruhen, Beneath Whose Hand: The Autobiography of R. M. Williams, South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1984. Anne Maree Jensen with Jeanne Ryckmans, The Flying Nun and the Women of the West, Milsons Point, NSW: Random House Australia, 1999. 8 Helen Avery, The Outer Edge, Longreach: Wonga Publications, 1997, unpaginated. 9 Carole Inkster, ‘Growth and Decline of the Queensland Schools of Arts, 1849–1981’, in Philip C. Candy and John Laurent, eds, Pioneering Culture. Mechanics’ Institutes and Schools of Art in Australia, Adelaide: Auslib Press, 1994, pp. 268–82. 10 Inkster, p. 279. 11 Hugh Lunn, ‘The Real Story of the Writers’ Train’, The Queensland Writer 2.2, 1991, p. 5. 12 J. J. Stable and A. E. M. Kirwood, A Book of Queensland Verse, Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, 1924, pp. xv–xvii. 13 Louisa Atkinson, Tressa’s Resolve, Canberra: Mulini Press, 2004, p. 61 (first published serially in the Sydney Mail in 1872). This section draws on Belinda McKay, ‘ “The One Jarring Note”: Race and Gender in Queensland Women’s Writing to 1939’, in Queensland Review 8.1, 2001, p. 32. 14 See Patricia Clarke, ‘The Queensland Shearers’ Strikes in Rosa Praed’s Fiction’, in Queensland Review 9.1, 2002, pp. 67–87. 15 Rosa Praed, Mrs Tregaskiss: A Novel of Anglo-Australian Life, 1895; New Edition, London: Chatto and Windus, 1897, p. 45. 16 Praed, Mrs Tregaskiss, pp. 45, 144. 17 Rosa Praed, Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land, 1893; London: Pandora, 1987, p. 62. 18 Mary Hannay Foott, Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems, London: Gordon & Gotch, 1885, p. 5.

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19 George Essex Evans, The Secret Key, and Other Verses, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1906, p. 10. 20 Evans, The Secret Key, p. 144. 21 Cecil Hadgraft, Queensland and Its Writers: 100 Years – 100 Authors, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1959, p. 22. 22 Ernest Favenc, Voices of the Desert, London: Elliot Stock, 1905, pp. xii–xiii. Ernest Favenc, The Explorers of Australia and Their Life-Work, Christchurch, NZ: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1908. Ernest Favenc, The Secret of the Australian Desert, London: Blackie & Son, 1895. 23 See Yvette Steinhauer, ‘A. M. Duncan-Kemp: Her Life and Work’, Journal of Australian Studies 67, 2001, pp. 37–43. 24 A. M. Duncan-Kemp, Our Sandhill Country: Nature and Man in SouthWestern Queensland, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1933, p. 43. 25 Dorothy Cottrell, Earth Battle, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930, pp. 5, 8. Published in the United States as Tharlane, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930. 26 Henry G. Lamond, Big Red, London: Faber, 1953, p. 9. 27 Elizabeth Webb, Into the Morning, London: Heinemann, 1958, cover blurb. 28 Patrick White, Voss: A Novel, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957. 29 Janette Turner Hospital, Oyster, Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 1996, pp. 4, 8, 299–301. 30 Turner Hospital, Oyster, pp. 397, 399. 31 Hazel McKellar, Matya-Mundu: A History of the Aboriginal People of South West Queensland, ed. Thom Blake, Cunnamulla: Cunnamulla Australian Native Welfare Association, 1984. Turner Hospital, Oyster, see acknowledgements and bibliography. 32 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition. Augustus Charles Gregory and Francis Thomas Gregory, Journals of Australian Explorations, Brisbane: J. C. Beal, Government Printer, 1884. Gordon Buchanan, Packhorse and Waterhole: With the Overlanders to the Kimblerleys, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1933. William Landsborough, Journal of Landsborough’s Expedition from Carpentaria, in Search of Burke and Wills, Melbourne: Bailliere, 1862. 33 Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958, pp. 197, 221. 34 Cliff Hanna, ‘The Ballads: Eighteenth Century to the Present’, in Laurie Hergenhan, ed., The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, Ringwood: Penguin, 1988, p. 206. 35 The Bronze Swagman Book of Bush Verse 26, Winton: Winton Tourist Promotion Association, 1997, p. 65. 36 The Bronze Swagman 26, pp. 74–75.

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37 Voices West, Longreach: National Outback Performing Arts, 1998, p. v. Bush Voices, Longreach: National Outback Performing Arts, 1995. 38 Voices West, p. 18. 39 Voices West, p. 24. 40 Voices West, pp. 52–53. 41 Voices West, p. 65. 42 Voices West, p. 101. 43 Ted Egan, ‘Foreword’, in Jack Drake, The Cattle Dog’s Revenge: Bush Ballads and Yarns, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2003. Although published in 2003, The Cattle Dog’s Revenge is discussed here because the ballads were largely written and performed before our cut-off date of 2001. 44 Drake, The Cattle Dog’s Revenge, p. 64. 45 Joy Baillie, Let It be Recorded: A Family’s Journey through Outback Queensland, Nambour: Joy Baillie, 1997. 46 Fleur Lehane, Heartbreak Corner: A Story of the Tully, Durack and Other Pioneer Families of South-West Queensland, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1998 (first edition published in 1996 by Fleur Lehane, Beaudesert). 47 See, for example, Richard Magoffin, Waltzing Matilda: The Story behind the Legend, Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1987 (first published as Waltzing Matilda: Song of Australia: A Folk-History, Charters Towers: Mimosa Press, 1983); and Richard Magoffin, The Provenance of Waltzing Matilda: A Definitive Exposition of the Song’s Origins, Meanings, and Evolution from a Pivotal Episode in Australian History, Kyuna, Qld: Matilda Expo Publishers, 2001. Richard Magoffin has written many books and articles on this topic. 48 Malcolm I. Thomis, Pastoral Country: A History of the Shire of Blackall, Milton: Jacaranda Press, 1979. 49 Angela Moffat, A History of the Graziers’ Association of Central and Northern Queensland, 1889–1989, Longreach: Boolarong Publications, for the Graziers’ Association of Central and Northern Queensland, 1989. 50 Isabel Hoch, Barcaldine 1846–1986, Barcaldine: Barcaldine Shire Council, 1986. Isabel Hoch, Alpha, Jericho: A History, 1846–1984, Alpha, Qld: Isabel Hoch, 1984. Isabel Hoch, Barcaldine 1846–1986, Barcaldine: Barcaldine Shire Council, 1986. Isabel Hoch, To the Setting Sun: A History of Railway Construction, Rockhampton to Longreach 1865–1892, Buranda: Robert Brown & Associates (Qld), 1992. 51 Jan L’Estrange, Belle of the Barcoo:Tambo: Genesis of Queensland’s Central West, Tambo: Jan L’Estrange, 1996.

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52 Peter Forrest, A Rush for Grass, Darwin: Murranji Press, and Ilfracombe: Ilfracombe Shire Council, 1988. 53 Claire Wagner, Frontier Town: Charleville 1865–1901, Brisbane: Boolarong, 1991. 54 Liz Huf, Lorna McDonald and David Myers, eds, Sin, Sweat and Sorrow: The Making of Capricornia Queensland, 1840s–1940s, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1993, p. xi. 55 Helen Avery, The Outer Edge, Longreach: Wonga Publications, 1997. 56 Isabel Hoch, No Tomorrow, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1997. Isabel Hoch, One More Moon, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1997. 57 Herb Wharton, Unbranded, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Herb Wharton, Cattle Camp: Murrie Drovers and Their Stories, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Herb Wharton, Where Ya’ Been, Mate?, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. Herb Wharton, Yumba Days, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999. Part 4: North Queensland Warm Words: N orth Que ensland Writing 1 Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 2 Ludwig Leichhardt, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington: A Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles, during the Years 1844–1845, London: T. & W. Boone, 1847. 3 William Carron, Narrative of an Expedition Undertaken under the Direction of the Late Mr Assistant Surveyor E. B. Kennedy for the Exploration of the Country between Rockingham Bay and Cape York, Sydney: Kemp and Fairfax, 1849. 4 Jean Farnfield, Frontiersman: A Biography of George Elphinstone Dalrymple, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 18–25. George Elphinstone Dalrymple, ‘Report on Journey from Rockingham Bay to the Valley of Lagoons’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 35, London, 1865, pp. 198–212. George Elphinstone Dalrymple, Report of the Queensland Government Schooner ‘Spitfire’ in Search of the Mouth of the River Burdekin, Brisbane: T. P. Pugh’s Printing Office, 1860. George Elphinstone Dalrymple, Narrative and Reports of the Queensland North-East Coast Expedition, 1873, Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command, Brisbane: James C. Beal, Government Printer, 1874. 5 Frederick J. Byerley, ed., Narrative of the Overland Expedition of the Messrs Jardine, from Rockhampton to Cape York, Northern Queensland, Brisbane: J. W. Buxton, 1867.

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6 William Hann, Copy of the Diary of the Northern Expedition under the Leadership of Mr William Hann, Brisbane: Government Printer, 1873. William Hann, Report from Mr William Hann, Leader of the Northern Expedition Party, Brisbane: Government Printer, 1873. 7 Ernest Favenc, ‘An Explorer’s Diary’, The Queenslander, 26 October 1878, p. 107. 8 Christie Palmerston, Diary of a Track-Cutting Expedition from the Johnstone River to Herberton, 1882, eds F. P. Woolston and F. S. Colliver, ‘Christie Palmerston: A North Queensland Pioneer Prospector and Explorer’, Queensland Heritage I: 7, 1967, pp. 30–34, and I: 8, 1968, pp. 26–31. All Palmerston’s writings and relevant documents are printed in Paul Savage’s biography: see below. 9 Paul Savage, Christie Palmerston, Explorer, Records of North Queensland History No. 2, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged by B. J. Dalton, Townsville: Department of History and Politics, James Cook University, 1992, p. 15. 10 Archibald Meston, ‘Expedition to Bellenden Ker’, The Queenslander, 25 May 1889, pp. 982–83; 1 June, pp. 1030–31; 12 October, pp. 693–94; 16 November, pp. 934–35; and 30 November, p. 1040. 11 George Windsor Earl, Handbook for Colonists in Tropical Australia, [Straits Settlements]: Matthew Gregory Sr at the Penang Gazette Press, 1863. Ada de Munari Choat, Alf Marinuzzi and Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien, eds, Italian Pioneers in the Innisfail District, Brisbane: Minerva E&S, 2003. 12 Edward Palmer, Early Days in North Queensland, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1903, pp. 1–2. 13 Ray Sumner, ‘Some Early Illusions Concerning North Queensland’, LiNQ 3:3/4, 1974, pp. 74–87. 14 Edward B. Kennedy, Four Years in Queensland, London: Stanford, 1870, p. 8. 15 Joseph Hann, ‘Joseph Hann and Family: Settlement in North Queensland 1861–1871’ (typescript in James Cook University Library). 16 Robert Gray, Reminiscences of India and North Queensland, 1857–1912, London: Constable, 1913. 17 Palmer, Early Days in North Queensland, pp. 213–14. 18 Charles W. Bryde, From Chart House to Bush Hut: Being the Record of a Sailor’s Seven Years in the Queensland Bush, Melbourne, H. H. Champion, Australasian Authors’ Agency, [1920]; 2nd edition, Rockhampton, 1977, pp. 158, 19. 19 Peter Bell, ‘The Writing of North Queensland History’, LiNQ 9:1, 1981, p. 57. 20 W. R. O. Hill, Forty-Five Years Experience in North Queensland: 1861–1905, Brisbane: H. Pole, 1907, p. 80. 21 W. H. Corfield, Reminiscences of Queensland, 1862–1899, Brisbane: Frater, 1921.

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22 C. H. Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, London: Longmans, Green, 1872. 23 A. W. Stirling, The Never Never Land: A Ride in North Queensland, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1884. 24 T. Weitemeyer, Missing Friends: Being the Adventures of a Danish Emigrant in Queensland 1871–1880, London: Fisher Unwin, 1892. 25 Arthur C. Bicknell, Travel and Adventure in Northern Queensland, London: Longmans Green, 1895. 26 Karl Lumholtz, Among Cannibals: An Account of Four Years’Travels in Australia, London: John Murray, 1889. 27 Marion Ellis Rowan, A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, London: John Murray, 1898; reissued as The Flower Hunter: The Adventures in Northern Australia and New Zealand of Flower Painter Ellis Rowan, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992. 28 Judith McKay, ‘Ellis Rowan, a Flower-Hunter’, Art and Australia Quarterly 27.4, Winter, 1990, pp. 578–79. 29 Edward B. Kennedy, Blacks and Bushrangers: Adventures in Queensland, London: Sampson Low Company, 1889. Edward B. Kennedy, The Black Police of Queensland: Reminiscences of Official Work and Personal Adventures in the Early Days of the Colony, London: John Murray, 1902. 30 Jack McLaren, Gentlemen of the Empire:The Colourful and Remarkable Experiences of District Commissioners, Patrol Officers and Other Officials in Some of the British Empire’s Tropical Outposts, London: Hutchinson, 1940. 31 Kennedy, The Black Police, pp. 162–63. 32 Edward J. Banfield, The Confessions of a Beachcomber, London: Fisher Unwin, 1908. Facsimile edition St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. 33 Edward J. Banfield, Last Leaves from Dunk Island, ed. A. H. Chisholm, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1925. Facsimile edition Melbourne: Currey O’Neil, 1982. 34 H. P. Heseltine, ‘The Confessions of a Beachcomber’, LiNQ 9:1, 1980, pp. 35–52. Robert Zeller, ‘E. J. Banfield as Naturalist’, Queensland Review 11:1, 2004, pp. 17–25. Michael Noonan, A Different Drummer: The Story of E. J. Banfield, the Beachcomber of Dunk Island, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983. 35 Heseltine, p. 51. 36 Jack McLaren, Red Mountain: A Romance of Tropical Australia, Sydney: New South Wales Bookstall, 1919. 37 Jack McLaren, Sun Man, London: Ernest Benn, 1928. Jack McLaren, A Diver Went Down, London: Mandrake Press, 1929. 38 Jack McLaren, My Odyssey, London: Ernest Benn, 1923. Jack McLaren, My Crowded Solitude, London: Fisher Unwin, 1926.

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39 McLaren, My Crowded Solitude, pp. 29, 11, 26, 41, 115–16. 40 Gilbert White, Thirty Years in Tropical Australia, London: Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1918. Reginald Spencer Browne, A Journalist’s Memories, Brisbane: Read, 1927. E. R. B. Gribble, Forty Years with the Aborigines, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930. 41 Mary M. Bennett, Christison of Lammermoor, [London]: Alston Rivers, 1927. Michael Costello, Life of John Costello, Sydney: Dymocks, 1930. 42 Beverley Eley, Ion Idriess, Sydney: ETT Imprint, 1995, p. 43. 43 Ion Idriess, Madman’s Island, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1927. 44 Ion Idriess, Headhunters of the Coral Sea, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930. Ion Idriess, Drums of Mer, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1933. 45 Ion Idriess, Isles of Despair, Angus & Robertson, 1947. 46 Ion Idriess, The Wild White Man of Badu: A Story of the Coral Sea, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1950. 47 Ion Idriess, Coral Sea Calling, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957. 48 Ion Idriess, Men of the Jungle, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1932. 49 Ion Idriess, Back o’ Cairns, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1958; reprinted HarperCollins, 1999. Ion Idriess, The Tin Scratchers, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1959. Ion Idriess, My Mate Dick, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962. 50 Eley, p. 354. 51 Ion Idriess, The Desert Column: Leaves from the Diary of an Australian Trooper in Gallipoli, Sinai and Palestine, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1932. 52 Hector Holthouse, River of Gold: The Wild Days of the Palmer River Gold Rush, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967. 53 Faith Bandler, Wacvie, Adelaide: Rigby, 1977. 54 Amalie Dietrich, Australische Briefe, ed. Augustin Lodewyckx, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, in association with Oxford University Press, 1943. 55 Rachel Henning, The Letters of Rachel Henning, ed. David Adams, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963. 56 Anne Allingham, ‘Victorian Frontierswomen: The Australian Journals and Diaries of Lucy and Eva Gray’, unpublished MA thesis, James Cook University, Townsville, 1987. 57 Allingham, p. 70. 58 Elizabeth O’Conner, Steak for Breakfast, 1958; Sydney: Angus & Robertson [Arkon Paperbacks], 1973. 59 Elizabeth O’Conner, A Second Helping, 1969; Sydney: Angus & Robertson [Arkon Paperbacks], 1973. 60 Cheryl Taylor, ‘Gender and Race Relations in Elizabeth O’Conner’s Northern Homesteads’, Australian Literary Studies 21:1, 2003, pp. 20–24.

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61 Hector Holthouse, S’pose I Die:The Story of Evelyn Maunsell, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973. 62 John Illingsworth, ed., A Christmas Card in April: Station Life on the Palmer River in the 1940s and 1950s, Townsville: History Department, James Cook University, 1990. 63 Marion Houldsworth, The Morning Side of the Hill, Townsville: Department of History and Politics, James Cook University, 1995. Marion Houldsworth, Barefoot through the Bindies: Growing up in North Queensland in the Early 1900s, Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2002. 64 Colin Bingham, The Beckoning Horizon: Growing Away from an Outback Childhood, Ringwood: Penguin, 1983, p. 2. 65 Bernard Smith, The Boy Adeodatus: The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard, Ringwood: Penguin, Allen Lane, 1984. 66 Joan Colebrook, A House of Trees, London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1987. 67 Alan Frost, East Coast Country: A North Queensland Dreaming, Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1996. 68 Roberta Sykes, Snake Dreaming: Autobiography of a Black Woman, 3 vols, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. [Snake Cradle vol. 1, 1997.] 69 Shirley Walker, Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate Chronicle, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001. 70 Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told?, Ringwood: Penguin, 2000. 71 See Cheryl Taylor, ‘Shaping a Regional Identity: Literary Non-Fiction and Fiction in North Queensland’, Queensland Review 8:2, 2001, pp. 41–52. 72 Patrick White, Voss, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1957. 73 Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves, London: Cape, 1976. 74 David Malouf, Remembering Babylon, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. 75 Alex Miller, Journey to the Stone Country, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003. 76 Thomas Shapcott, Theatre of Darkness: A Novel of Music, Obsession, Fame and Love, Sydney: Vintage, 1998. 77 Ernest Favenc, ‘Jack Essingham; or the Graves of a Household: A Tale of Northern Queensland’, The Queenslander, 21 August – 18 December 1875. 78 Louis Becke, Tom Gerrard, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904. 79 Louis Becke, Chinkie’s Flat and Other Stories, London: G. Bell, 1904, pp. 84, 85. 80 Randolph Bedford, Aladdin and the Boss Cockie, Sydney: Bookstall Series, 1920. 81 Nancy Francis, ‘Queensland Luck’, Northern Herald, 8 August – 10 October 1923.

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82 Rosa Campbell Praed, The Lost Earl of Ellan: A Story of Australian Life, London: Chatto & Windus, 1906. Serialised in the Age, 9 December 1905 – 26 May 1906. 83 Rosa Campbell Praed, Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush, London: John Long, 1903, p. 31. 84 Zora Cross, The Lute-Girl of Rainyvale: A Story of Love, Mystery, and Adventure in Northern Queensland, London: Hutchinson, 1925, p. 50. 85 Dorothy Cottrell, The Singing Gold, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929. Serialised in American Ladies Home Journal in 1927 and Sydney Mail in October 1928 – February 1929. 86 Ross Smith, ‘A Forgotten Novel of North Queensland: Marie Bjelke Petersen’s Jungle Night (1937)’, LiNQ 16:1, 1988, pp. 89–99. Marie Bjelke-Petersen, Jungle Night, London: Hutchinson, 1937. 87 David Carter, ‘Documenting and Criticising Society’, in Laurie Hergenhan, ed., The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, Ringwood: Penguin, 1988, pp. 370–72. 88 Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven. A New Scholarly Edition, ed. Nicole Moore, Carlton North: Vulgar Press, 2002; first published Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1936. 89 Jean Devanny, Paradise Flow, London: Duckworth, 1938. 90 Jean Devanny, By Tropic Sea and Jungle, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1944. 91 Jean Devanny, Roll Back the Night, London: Robert Hale, 1945. 92 Carole Ferrier, Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999. 93 Jean Devanny, Travels in North Queensland, London: Jarrolds, 1951. Jean Devanny, Bird of Paradise, Sydney: Frank Johnson, 1945. 94 Jean Devanny, Cindie, ed. Carole Ferrier, London: Virago, 1986; first published London: Robert Hale, 1949. 95 Jean Devanny, Point of Departure, ed. Carole Ferrier, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1986. 96 Sarah Campion, Mo Burdekin, London: Peter Davies, 1941. Sarah Campion, Bonanza, London: Peter Davies, 1942. Sarah Campion, The Pommy Cow, London: Peter Davies, 1944. 97 Campion, Mo Burdekin, p. 10. 98 Campion, The Pommy Cow, p. 231. 99 Joan Colebrook, The Northerner, Sydney: Invincible Press, 1950, p. 59. 100 Elizabeth O’Conner, The Irishman, 1960; Sydney: Angus & Robertson [Arkon Paperbacks], 1978. 101 Elizabeth O’Conner, Find a Woman, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963. 102 Elizabeth O’Conner, The Chinee Bird, Sydney: Ure Smith, 1966, p. 16.

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103 Elizabeth O’Conner [as Anne Willard], The Wind of Fate, London: Macdonald & Jane’s, 1977. 104 Elizabeth O’Conner, Spirit Man, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980, p. 7. 105 John Naish, The Cruel Field, London: Hutchinson, 1962, pp. 13, 157. 106 John Naish, That Men Should Fear, London: Hutchinson, 1963. 107 Nancy Cato, Brown Sugar, London: Heinemann, 1974; London: Pan Books, 1977, p. 168. 108 Neilma Sidney, Journey to Mourilyan: A Coastal Pilgrimage, Melbourne: J. M. Dent [Houghton-Mifflin Company of Boston], 1986. Rosaleen Love, Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef, St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000. 109 Betty Collins, The Copper Crucible, Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1966; republished with censored material included and an introduction by Ian Syson, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989. Kay Brown, Knock Ten: A Novel of Mining Life, Sydney: Wentworth Books, 1976. 110 Ian Syson, ‘Towards a Poetics of Working Class Writing’, Southern Review 26, 1993, p. 91. 111 Carole Ferrier, ‘Kay Brown Remembers Jean Devanny’ [edited interview], Hecate XIII, 1987, pp. 132–37. 112 Carole Ferrier, ed., As Good as a Yarn with You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Gina Mercer, Parachute Silk: Friends, Food, Passion: A Novel in Letters, North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2001, p. 11. 113 Kay Donovan, Bush Oranges, Ringwood: Viking, 2001. 114 Janette Turner Hospital, ‘Litany for the Homeland’, Homeland, ed. George Papaellinas, North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991, p. 22; North of Nowhere South of Loss, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003, p. 271. 115 Janette Turner Hospital, ‘You Gave Me Hyacinths’, Dislocations, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987, pp. 23–31. (Turner Hospital stated in interview that this story was her first attempt at fiction, c. 1971 (LiNQ 17:1, 1990, p. 22).) 116 Janette Turner Hospital, ‘The Last of the Hapsburgs’, Isobars, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1990, pp. 11–27. 117 Janette Turner Hospital, ‘The Second Coming of Come-by-Chance’, Isobars, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1990, pp. 38–51. 118 Janette Turner Hospital, ‘North of Nowhere’, Nimrod: International Journal of Prose and Poetry 36:2, 1993, pp. 15–26; North of Nowhere South of Loss, pp. 23–43. 119 Janette Turner Hospital, ‘Cape Tribulation’, Westerly 42:4, 1997, p. 22; North of Nowhere South of Loss, p. 122.

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120 Xavier Herbert, Capricornia: A Novel, Sydney: The Publicist, 1938. 121 Xavier Herbert, South of Capricornia: Short Stories, 1925–1934, ed. Russell McDougall, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990. 122 Xavier Herbert, Poor Fellow My Country, Sydney: Collins, 1975. 123 Louis Nowra, Capricornia, Sydney: Currency Press in association with Belvoir Street Theatre, 1988. 124 Xavier Herbert, Soldiers’Women, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1961. 125 Xavier Herbert, Seven Emus, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1959. Xavier Herbert, Larger than Life: Twenty Short Stories, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963. 126 Xavier Herbert, Disturbing Element, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1963. 127 Thea Astley, Girl with a Monkey, 1958; Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1977, p. 144. 128 Thea Astley, A Descant for Gossips, London: Angus & Robertson, 1960. 129 Thea Astley, The Well Dressed Explorer, 1962; Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1977, pp. 138, 255. 130 Thea Astley, The Slow Natives, 1965; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1976, p. 209. 131 Thea Astley, A Boat Load of Home Folk, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1968. 132 Thea Astley, The Acolyte, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. 133 Thea Astley, A Kindness Cup, Melbourne: Nelson, 1974. Thea Astley, Hunting the Wild Pineapple, and Other Related Stories, West Melbourne: Nelson, 1979. Thea Astley, An Item from the Late News, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982. 134 Thea Astley, Beachmasters, Ringwood: Penguin/Viking, 1985. 135 Thea Astley, The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Ringwood: Viking, 1996. 136 Thea Astley, It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from a Family Album, New York: Putnam, 1987. 137 Thea Astley, Vanishing Points, Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1992. 138 Thea Astley, Reaching Tin River, Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1990. 139 Thea Astley, Coda, Port Melbourne: Heinemann Australia, 1994. 140 Thea Astley, Drylands: A Book for the World’s Last Reader, Ringwood: Viking, 1999. 141 Victor Kennedy, Cyclone: Selected Poems, [Melbourne]: Jindyworobak, [1949]. Hugh Skinner, Rain Forest Musings, [Kuranda: Rainforest Musings, c. 1991]. Sybil J. Kimmins, Tropical Musings, Cairns: S. J. Kimmins, [1993]. 142 Elizabeth Perkins and Robert Handicott, eds, North of Capricorn: An Anthology of Verse, Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, 1990.

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Stefanie Bennett, ed., Three North Queensland Poets: Stefanie Bennett, R. G. Hay and Anne Lloyd, [Townsville]: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, 1990. 143 Gilbert White, Night, and Other Verses, Townsville: Hastings, 1897. 144 John Knight, ‘On the “Great Barrier Reef,” off the Queensland Coast’, in John Knight, ‘One People, One Destiny’ and Other Poems, Maryborough: Alston & Co. Printers, 1894, pp. 32–33. 145 E. M. England, The Happy Monarch and Other Verses, Brisbane: CarterWatson, 1927. E. M. England, Queensland Days: Poems, Sydney: Dymock’s Book Arcade, 1944. E. M. England, Where the Old Road Ran and Other Poems, Brisbane: Fortitude Press, 1970. 146 Kennedy, Cyclone, pp. 7, 8. 147 Colin Bingham, Marcinelle and Other Verses, Brisbane: Carter-Watson, 1925. 148 Colin Bingham, A Book of Verse, Brisbane: Carter-Watson, 1929, p. 18. 149 Colin Bingham, Sixteen Poems, Brisbane: Telegraph, 1940. 150 Colin Bingham, Decline of Innocence and Other Poems, Sydney: Tonecraft, 1970, pp. 28, 7. 151 Nancy Francis, ‘Sunrise at Cairns’, in Feet in the Night and Other Poems, Cairns: Cairns Post Print, 1947, p. 56. Philip Lorimer, ‘Queensland’, in Perkins and Handicott, eds, North of Capricorn, p. 81. 152 C. B. Christesen, ‘Foxes in the Mango-Tree’, Meanjin 18:1, 1959, pp. 77–79. C. B. Christesen, ‘Galahs in Slow Flight’ and ‘Summer Night’, in The Hand of Memory: Selected Stories and Verse, Melbourne: Meanjin Press, 1970, p. 79. 153 Noel Macainsh, ‘The Mango Tree’, LiNQ 4:3/4, 1975, p. 57. 154 Noel Macainsh, ‘Literature in North Queensland – Some Thoughts on Regionalism’, LiNQ 1:3, 1972, p. 8. 155 Robert Handicott, Small Beer, Brisbane: Queensland Community Press, 1982. Robert Handicott, North, South and Elsewhere, Brisbane: Queensland Community Press, 1988. Robert Handicott, The Worry Egg, Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, 1998. 156 Lele Ara, ‘The Home I Prapa Miss’, Black Voices 3:2, December 1987, p. 32. Lele Ara, ‘The Morning Glory’, Black Voices 3:1, July 1987, p. 29. Anne Mairu-Kaczmarek, ‘Memories’, Black Voices 4:2, December 1988, p. 39. Gata Alfred, ‘Freedom of Choice’, Black Voices 3:2, December 1987, p. 31. 157 Bobbi [Roberta] Sykes, Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions, Cammeray, NSW: Saturday Centre, 1979. 158 Nicole Williams, Inside M y World, Cairns: N. Williams, 1995. 159 Maria Fresta, ‘To the Girls Who Sit in Bamaga Hospital’, LiNQ 4:1/2, 1975, p. 27. Maria Fresta, ‘For My Father’, LiNQ 1:2, 1972, p. 21.

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160 Ted Nielsen, Search Engine, Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 1999, p. 7. 161 Rob Riel, For as Long as You Burn, Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 1999. 162 Iem Brown and Joan Davis, eds, Di Serambi: On the Verandah: A Bilingual Anthology of Modern Indonesian Poetry, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 163 Fiona Perry, Pharaohs Returning, Ringwood: Penguin, assisted by the Literature Board of the Australia Council, 1991. 164 Tessa Theocharous, Psyche, Rangewood, Queensland: Strawberry House, 1995. 165 Rebecca Edwards, ‘Eating the Experience: A Warning’, in Eating the Experience, Brisbane: Metro Press, 1994, p. 20. 166 Rebecca Edwards, Scar Country, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000, p. 83. 167 Gina Mercer, The Ocean in the Kitchen, Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 1999, pp. 5, 32. Part 5: Statewide Themes ‘Bitin’ Back’: Indigenous Writing in Queensland 1 R. M. Dixon and Grace Koch, eds, Dyirbal Song Poetry: The Oral Literature of an Australian Rainforest People, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. 2 Moonie Jarl [Wilf Reeves], The Legends of Moonie Jarl, Milton, Qld: Jacaranda Press, 1964. 3 Kath Walker [Oodgeroo Noonuccal], The Dawn Is at Hand: Poems, Milton, Qld: Jacaranda Press, 1966. Kath Walker [Oodgeroo Noonuccal], My People: A Kath Walker Collection, Milton, Qld: Jacaranda Press, 1970. 4 Kath Walker [Oodgeroo Noonuccal], Stradbroke Dreamtime, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. 5 Lionel Fogarty, Booyooburra: A Tale of the Wakka Murri, South Melbourne: Hyland House, 1993, p. 68. 6 John Graham, Land Window, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998. 7 Maureen Watson, From Dreamtime to Spaceships (sound recording), Richmond, Vic.: Hodja Educational Resources Cooperative, 1984. Maureen Watson, Kaiyu’s Waiting: An Aboriginal Story, Richmond, Vic.: Hodja Educational Resources, c. 1984. 8 Sam Wagan Watson, Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. 9 Lisa Bellear, Dreaming in Urban Areas, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996, pp. 16, 13, 43, 42, 3, 56.

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10 Monica Clare, Karobran: The Story of an Aboriginal Girl, Sydney: Alternative Publishing, 1978. 11 Labumore [Elsie Roughsey], An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New, ed. Paul Memmott and Robyn Horsman, Fitzroy: McPhee Gribble, and Ringwood: Penguin, 1984. 12 Marnie Kennedy, Born a Half-Caste, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1985, pp. 24, 5, 3–4. 13 Mabel Edmund, No Regrets, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Mabel Edmund, Hello, Johnny! Stories of My Aboriginal and South Sea Islander Families, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. 14 Ruth Hegarty, Is that You, Ruthie?, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999, pp. x, 42–43, 15. 15 Hegarty, p. 137. 16 Rita Huggins and Jackie Huggins, Auntie Rita, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994, pp. 3, 4. 17 Wayne King, Black Hours, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996, pp. 75, 233. 18 Bill Dodd, Broken Dreams, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992. 19 Albert Holt, Forcibly Removed, Broome: Magabala Books, 2001. 20 Boori Pryor, with Meme McDonald, Ringwood: Penguin, 1998, p. 146. 21 Sam Watson, The Kadaitcha Sung, Ringwood: Penguin, 1990. 22 Watson, The Kadaitcha Sung, pp. 102, 311. 23 Herb Wharton, Unbranded, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Herb Wharton, Cattle Camp, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Herb Wharton, Where Ya’ Been, Mate?, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. Herb Wharton, Yumba Days, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999. 24 Melissa Lucashenko, Steam Pigs, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, pp. 146, 2, 191. 25 Melissa Lucashenko, Killing Darcy, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998. 26 Melissa Lucashenko, Hard Yards, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999. 27 Alexis Wright, ‘Politics of Exposure: An Interview with Alexis Wright’, conducted by Alison Ravenscroft, Meridian 17.1, 1998, p. 79. 28 Alexis Wright, Plains of Promise, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, p. 43. 29 Vivienne Cleven, Bitin’ Back, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001, p. 184.

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Locating Queensland Children’s Literature: Reef, Bush and City 1 Brenda Niall, Australia Through the Looking-Glass: Children’s Fiction, 1830– 1980, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1984. 2 Marcie Muir and Kerry White, Australian Children’s Books: A Bibliography, 3 vols, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992–2004. 3 Maurice Saxby, A History of Australian Children’s Literature 1841–1941, Sydney: Wentworth Books, 1969. 4 Gillian Whitlock, ‘Speaking from the Warm Zone’, in On the Edge: Women’s Experiences of Queensland, ed. Gail Reekie, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1994, p. 168. 5 Saxby, A History of Australian Children’s Literature, p. 30. 6 Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 1. 7 Edward B. Kennedy, Blacks and Bushrangers, London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1889, pp. 238, 240, 219, 292. See also Edward B. Kennedy, The Black Police of Queensland: Reminiscences of Official Work and Personal Adventures in the Early Days of the Colony, London: John Murray, 1902. 8 Charles Barrett, The Isle of Palms, Melbourne: Lothian, 1915, pp. 57, 63. 9 Barrett, Isle of Palms, pp. 116–17, 127, 134. 10 Barrett, Isle of Palms, pp. 120, 170. 11 Conrad H. Sayce, The Splendid Savage, London: Thomas Nelson, 1928, p. 20. 12 Tom Stanley Hepworth, Castaways of the Monoboola: A Story for Boys, Sydney: Dymock’s Book Arcade Ltd, 1948. 13 Hepworth, Castaways of the Monoboola, pp. 54, 39, 57, 84. 14 Hepworth, Castaways of the Monoboola, pp. 113, 92, 117, 191, 190. 15 Hepworth, Castaways of the Monoboola, p. 204. 16 William Hatfield, Barrier Reef Days, Oxford University Press, 1948, pp. 38, 58, 67. 17 Hesba Fay Brinsmead, Isle of the Sea Horse, London: Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 135, 127, 122, 18 Brinsmead, Isle of the Sea Horse, pp. 80, 156, 178, 123, 126. 19 Brinsmead, Isle of the Sea Horse, pp. 181, 19. 20 Michael Costello, Harold Effermere: A Story of the Queensland Bush, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1897; Melbourne: G. Robertson, 1897. 21 Costello, Harold Effermere, pp. 235–36, 68. 22 E. L. Haverfield, Queensland Cousins, London: Nelson, [1908], pp. 198, 199. Haverfield was born in 1870. 23 Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians, London: Ward, Lock and Bowden, 1894.

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24 Frances Campbell, Two Queenslanders and Their Friends, London: Alexander Moring, 1904, p. 30. 25 Kay Glasson Taylor, Pick and the Duffers, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930. 26 Belinda McKay, ‘ “A Lovely Land . . . by Shadows Dark Untainted”?: Whiteness and Early Queensland Women’s Writing’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ed., Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004, pp. 161–62. 27 Kay Glasson Taylor, Bim, Sydney: Currawong, 1947, p. 204. 28 Joseph Bowes, The Young Settler: The Story of a New Chum in Queensland, London: The Epworth Press, 1927, p. 26. 29 Bowes, The Young S ettler, p. 88. 30 Constance Mackness, The Glad School, Sydney: Cornstalk, 1929. 31 Miriam Agatha, Nellie Doran: A Story of Australian Home and School Life, Sydney: E. J. Dwyer, 1923. 32 Margaret Trist, Morning in Queensland, London: W. H. Allen, 1958. 33 Sharyn Pearce, ‘The Evolution of the Queensland Kid: Changing Literary Representations of Queensland Children in Children’s and Adolescent Fiction’, in Young in a Warm Climate: Essays in Queensland Childhood, Queensland Review 3.2, 1996, p. 68. 34 Moore Raymond, Smiley, London: Sylvan Press, 1945, pp. 183, 10, 84. 35 Michael Noonan, Flying Doctor on the Great Barrier Reef, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1962. 36 A.A.B. and Helumac, Australian Wonderland: a Fairy Chain, London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1899. 37 Hesba Brinsmead, Pastures of the Blue Crane, London: Oxford University Press, 1964. 38 John Foster, Ern Finnis and Maureen Nimon, Australian Children’s Literature: An Exploration of Genre and Theme, Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt University, 1995, p. 60. 39 Max Fatchen, Chase through the Night, Sydney: Methuen, 1976, p. 40. 40 Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Stradbroke Dreamtime, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. 41 Ian Ottley, The Creeklanders, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991. 42 Nigel Krauth and Caron Krauth, I Thought You Kissed with Your Lips, Ringwood: Penguin, 1990, pp. 22–23. 43 Whitlock, ‘Speaking from the Warm Zone’, p. 173. 44 Gary Crew, Strange Objects: A Novel, Port Melbourne: Heinemann, 1990. 45 Gary Crew, Angel’s Gate, Port Melbourne: Heinemann, 1993. 46 Gary Crew, No Such Country: A Book of Antipodean Hours, Port Melbourne: Heinemann, 1991.

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47 James Moloney, Dougy, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993. 48 James Moloney, Gracey, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. 49 Brian Caswell, Merryll of the Stones, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989. 50 Sue Gough, It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992. 51 Sue Gough, Wyrd, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993. 52 Louise Elliott, Dangerous Redheads, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993. 53 Stephen Herrick, Water Bombs: A Book of Poems for Teenagers, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995. 54 Catherine Bateson, A Dangerous Girl, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. 55 Venero Armanno, The Ghost of Love Street, Melbourne: Lothian Books, 1997. 56 Nick Earls, After January, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. 57 Nick Earls, 48 Shades of Brown, Ringwood: Penguin, 1999. 58 Jenny Wagner, John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, London: Kestrel Books, 1977. 59 Philip Neilsen, Emma and the Megahero, Dingley, Vic.: Mammoth, 1995. 60 Philip Neilsen, The Wombat Ki ng, Port Melbourne: Lothian, 1997. 61 Philip Neilsen, The Lie, Port Melbourne: Lothian, 1997. 62 Gary Crew and Philip Neilsen, Edward Britton, Melbourne: Lothian Books, 2000. 63 Kim Wilkins, Bloodlace: A Gina Champion Mystery, Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins, 2001. The subsequent novels in this series were published beyond the time-frame of this literary history. 64 Quoted by Brenda Niall in ‘Children’s Literature’, in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, ed. L. T. Hergenhan, Ringwood: Penguin, 1988, p. 554. 65 Ruth Manley, The Plum Rain Scroll, Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978; reprinted St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2005. 66 R. S. Porteous, Tambai Island, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1955. R. S. Porteous, The Tambai Treasure, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1958. R. S. Porteous, The Silent Isles, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963. The Holiday-Maker’s Happy Hunting Ground: Travel Writing in Queensland 1 Edward Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin, 1985, pp. 4–9. 2 John McDouall Stuart, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart, 2nd edn, London: Saunders, 1865, p. 213.

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3 See Jim Davidson and Peter Spearritt, Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870, Carlton: Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 2000. 4 The Journals of the Jardine Brothers and Surveyor Richardson on the Overland Expedition from Rockhampton to Somerset, Cape York, with an Introduction by Les Hiddins, North Adelaide: Corkwood Press, 1998, p. xii. (This is a facsimile of the original Brisbane edition of 1867.) 5 The Journals of the Jardine Brothers and Surveyor Richardson, p. xi. 6 The Journals of the Jardine Brothers and Surveyor Richardson, p. 153. 7 The Journals of the Jardine Brothers and Surveyor Richardson, p. 67. 8 John Potts, One Year of Anti-Chinese work in Queensland, with Incidents of Travel, Brisbane: Davidson & Metcalfe, 1888, p. 7. 9 Anon., ‘Up North’: A Woman’s Journey through Tropical Queensland, Brisbane: A. J. Cumming, Government Printer, issued by the Intelligence & Tourist Bureau, 1912, p. 29. 10 Anon., The Wonderland of the North: Scenic Beauties of North Queensland, Australia’s Winter Tour of Tours, Brisbane: Queensland Government Intelligence & Tourist Bureau, 1922, pp. 15–16. 11 Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory,1880 –1939, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997. 12 Ernest Giles, Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, 2 vols, London: Sampson Low, 1889, vol. 1, pp. 183–84. 13 W. Lavallin Puxley, Wanderings in the Queensland Bush, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923, p. 159. 14 G. E. Terry, Unknown North Queensland: A Trip to Cairns: Descriptive Sketches and Appreciations with a Study of the Racial Problem on the Spot, Cohuna, Vic.: ‘Cohuna Farmers’ Weekly’, 1932, p. 55. 15 Terry, p. 53. 16 ‘A Commercial Traveller’, Diary of a Three Months’ Trip to the Outlying Districts of the North and North-West of Queensland during the Period of the Late Disastrous Floods, Brisbane: Woodcock & Powell, 1887, p. 15. 17 William Senior, Near and Far: An Angler’s Sketches of Home Sport and Colonial Life, London: Sampson Low, 1888, p. 239. 18 Arthur C. Bicknell, Travel and Adventure in Northern Queensland, London: Longmans Green, 1895, p. 47. 19 Jane De Falbe, My Dear Miss Macarthur: The Recollections of Emmeline Maria Macarthur (1828–1911), Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1988, pp. 43– 55. Quoted in Maurice French, Travellers in a Landscape: Visitors’ Impressions of the Darling Downs 1827–1954, Toowoomba: University of Southern Queensland, p. 99.

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20 Marion Ellis Rowan, A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, London: John Murray, 1898; reissued as The Flower Hunter: The Adventures in Northern Australia and New Zealand of Flower Painter Ellis Rowan, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992, p. 38. 21 Judith McKay, Ellis Rowan: A Flower Hunter in Queensland, Brisbane: Queensland Museum, pp. 17–18. 22 Rowan, The Flower Hunter, p. 89. 23 Frank Clune, Free and Easy Land, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, p. 140. 24 Anon., Beautiful Queensland; The Land of Variety and the Holiday-Maker’s Happy Hunting Ground, Brisbane: Government Printer, 1926, p. 32. 25 Anon., Beautiful Queensland, p. 37. 26 L. L Wirt, ‘Nature’s Australian Masterpiece’, in Handbook to Cairns and Hinterland, Queensland Railways, 1915, p. 15. 27 Geoff Monteith, The Butterfly Man of Kuranda, Frederick Parkhurst Dodd, South Brisbane: Queensland Museum, 1991, p. 27. 28 Anon., Beauty’s Home and Fortune’s Fairest Field, Brisbane: Government Printer, c. 1918, p. 36. 29 Rowan, The Flower Hunter, p. 42. 30 A. T. Nixon, Travel in the Tropics, Sydney: A. T. Nixon, 1941, p. 162. 31 Jean Devanny, Travels in North Queensland, London: Jarrolds, 1951, p. 174. 32 See Carole Ferrier, Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999, p. 265. 33 John K. Ewers, With the Sun on My Back, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1953, pp. 221–32. 34 Eleanor Dark, quoted in Ewers, p. 183. Eleanor Dark, ‘The Blackall Range Country’, Walkabout, 1 November 1955, p. 20. 35 Robyn Davidson, Tracks, London: Cape, 1980. See The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing, edited by Ros Pesman, David Walker and Richard White, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 269. 36 Jeff Carter, People of the Inland, Melbourne: Rigby, 1966, p. 1. Malcolm Douglas and David Oldmeadow, Across the Top (and Other Places), Melbourne: Rigby, 1972, p. 103. 37 Quoted in The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing, p. 188. 38 Peter Pinney, Restless Men, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966, p. 33. 39 Peter Pinney and Estelle Runcie, Too Many Spears, London: Angus & Robertson, 1978. 40 Gerard Lee, Eating Dog: Travel Stories, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993, pp. 3–55. 41 Adelaide Lubbock, Australian Roundabout, London & Melbourne: William Heinemann Ltd, 1963, pp. 85–94, 95–106, 107–16.

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42 Lubbock, Australian Roundabout, p. 92. 43 Elspeth Huxley, Their Shining Eldorado: A Journey Through Australia, London: Chatto & Windus, 1967, p. 9. 44 Huxley, Their Shining Eldorado, pp. 367, 354. 45 http://www.skyrail.com.au/rainforests.html